FHE SECRET -i, 
OF HAMLET I 



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South G. Preston 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Ciiap.i__:'.i. Copyright Ko. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE SECRET OF HAMLE 



PRINCE OF DENMARK. 



BY 



SOUTH G. PRESTON. 



CINCINNATI, OHIO. 

Thb Kditoe. Publishing Compait?, 

No. 337 Pike Building. 




TWO COPIES RECEIVED 



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copyright. 1897 . by 
The Editor Pubushinq Company. 



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(3)- 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. The Arcanum of the Word * Hamlet' 7 

II. The Art of Shakespeare ... 18 

III. The Apparition . . -29 

IV. Hamlet and Ophelia . . , 38 
V. Hamlet and Ophelia (Continued) . 51 

VI. Hamlet and Horatio ... 63 

VII. The Secret of Hamlet . 76 

VIII. The Play Within The Play . 88 

IX. Hamlet and the Cherub . . loi 

X. Death of Hamlet .... in 

XI. Horatio and Ophelia .... 120 

Epilogue ..... 132 



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MOTTOES. 



Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe 
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 

And yet be patient. One Playwright may show. 
In some fifth act, what this wild drama means. 

—Tennyson, *' The Play." 

Antonio. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. 

It wearies me; you say, it wearies you; 

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, 

What stuff 't is made of, whereof it is born, 

I am to learn ; 

And such a war*:-wit sadness makes of me, 

That I have much ado to know myself. 
***** 
Gratiano. You look not well, Signior Antonio ; 

You have too much respect upon the world : 

They lose it, that do buy it with much care. 

Believe me you are marvellously chang'd. 
Antonio. I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; 

A stage, where every man must play a part, 

And mine a sad one. 
— Shakespeare, " The Merchant of Venice." 

My mystery is for me, and for the sons of my house. — 
Saying attributed to Jesus in Clem. Alex. Strom, v. lo, 64. 

His care to guide his fiock and feed his lambs. 
By words, works, prayers, psalms, alms, and anagrams. 

— Cotton Mather. 



(6) 



THE SECRET OF HAMLET, 



I. 

THE ARCANUM OF THE WORD 'HAMLET/ 

The word ' Hamlet ' reveals to the initiated the 
secret of the character of the hero of the myste- 
rious play of Shakespeare entitled, ' Hamlet, 
Prince of Denmark.' The name is evidently ana- 
grammatized from the name 'Amleth,' of Icelandic 
origin, which is derived from the Norse aml^ toil 
(still used, colloquially in Icelandic, amla^ to toil), 
and lothi, devoted to, and probably has reference 
to his mythic impersonation of the endless toil and 
travail of the sea. In modern Icelandic the word 
amlothi is a regular equivalent for an idiotic or 
stupid man. So, in the very beginning, the pro- 
phetic character of the person named ' Hamlet,' 
and the assumed role of this typical Man, is inti- 
mated in the name 'Amleth.' 

Life itself is the mysterious sea on which Man — 
Humanity — toils and sails in the little body-ship of 
the human spirit; and 'Amlothi' or 'Amleth' is 
a person devoted to toil in journeying over the 
* sea of life.' 

Shakespeare intensified and enlarged the mean- 

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8 The Secret of Hamlet. 

ing of the word 'Amleth,' so that his word should 
intimate his intensified and enlarged view of life. 

* Hamlet ' is Shakespeare — his word, logos — the 
revelation of his philosophy of life ; the only- 
begotten name of his genius ; the Man through 
whom he reveals himself to the world. 

There is a close relation between philosophy and 
literature ; the greatest masters in philosophy have 
also been the greatest masters in literature. Plato, 
in his philosophy, gave voice to 

* * " the prophetic soul of the wide world, 
Dreaming on things to come," 

and expressed the prophetic hopes and longings of 
the human soul, for the want which has been sup- 
plied by the revelation of the light of the world. 

And in ' Hamlet ' Shakespeare appears in litera- 
ture as the most articulate voice, crying from the 
profound depths of universal human experience, 
in despairing thunder-tones, for the Savior of 
' thought ' and ' life ; ' for one whose knowledge 
and life will save thought from insanity, and life 
from death. 

The fact of human sin is recognized by the con- 
science and consciousness of men ; and most 
clearly attested in the highest forms of literature, 
as in the ' Odyssey ' of Homer, the ' ^neid ' of 
Virgil, and the ' Hamlet ' of Shakespeare. 

Sin is the contradiction of life, the subversion 
of energy, the unreality of life, the movement of 
an empty masquerade ; and when once conscience 



The Secret of Hamlet. 9 

awakens to the sense of sin, with discord and 
death, there comes for it no obliteration — 

**Nor poppy, nor mandragora, 
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
Which thou owedst yesterday." 

The Actor says in that awful tragedy . ' 

" I 'gin to be aweary o' the sun." 

This, in human experience, is the drear of sin, 
that in the gathering night yet discerns through 
the baleful shadows its own discord. This becomes 
its intolerable burden and its torment. 

Shakespeare anagrammatized ' Amleth ' into 
* Hamlet ' by transposing the final letter h and 
placing it first in the name 'Hamlet.' The pur- 
pose of this anagrammatization is not explained by 
the suggestion of euphony. Camden (Remains, 
7th ed., 1674) defines ' Anagrammatisme ' as *' a 
dissolution of a name truly written into his letters, 
as his elements, and a new connection of it by arti- 
ficial transposition, without addition, subtraction, 
or change of any letter, into different words, mak- 
ing some perfect sense applyable to the person 
named." 

This old English definition indicates the purpose 
of Shakespeare, who, desiring a name concealing, 
yet revealing to the * initiate,' the character of the 
Hero of his Tragedy, found in the word ' Hamlet ' 
the name that felicitously displayed to perfection 
the ' applyable sense ' he desired. The * Eliza- 
bethan Age ' was not averse to what might be 



lO The Secret of Hamlet, 

justly styled the 'Anagrammatic craze.' 'Eleanor 
Audley,' wife of Sir John Davies, is said to have 
been brought before the High Commission in 1634 
for extravagances, stimulated by the discovery that 
her name could be transposed to ' Reveale, O 
Daniel,' and to have been laughed out of court by 
another anagram, submitted by the Dean of the 
Arches — ' Dame Eleanor Davies,' ' Never soe mad a 
ladie.' 

*' Perhaps," says a recent author, " the only prac- 
tical use to which anagrams have been turned is to 
be found in the transpositions in. which some of the 
astronomers of the seventeenth century embodied 
their discoveries, with the design apparently of 
avoiding the risk that, while they were engaged 
in further verification, the credit of what they had 
found out might be claimed by others. Thus Galileo 
announced his discovery that Venus had phases 
like the moon in the form : ^Hcec immatura a me 
jamfrustra Icguntcroy ;'' that is, *• Cynthice Jiguras 
ccmulatur Mater Ajnorum.'' " 

Indeed, there seems to be an ' anagrammatic * 
tendency in many great writers. Pilate's ques- 
tion, ^ ^uid est Veritas?'' has been changed into 
'Sst Vir qui adest; ' ' Horatio Nelson ' into 
'Honor est a Nilo; ' ' Florence Nightingale ' into 
' Flit on, cheering angel ; ' 'James Stuart ' into 'A 
just master ; ' and ' Charles James Stuart ' into 
' Claimes Arthur's seat.' 

The pseudonyms adopted by authors are often 
transposed forms, more or less exact, of their 
names; thus, * Calvinus ' becomes 'Alcuinus;' 



The Secret of Hamlet. 1 1 

* Francois Rabelais,' 'Alcofribas Nasier;' 'Bryan 
Waller Proctor,' ' Barry Cornwall, poet ; ' ' Henry 
Rogers,' ' R. E. H. Greyson.' 'Telliamed,' a 
simple reversal,' is the title of a well-known work 
by ' De Maillet.' The most remarkable pseudonym 
of this class is the name ' Voltaire,' which the 
celebrated philosopher assumed instead of his fam- 
ily name, Francois Marie Arouet, and which is now 
generally allowed to be an anagram of 'Arouet I. J./ 
that is, Arouet the younger (lejeune, the younger). 

The name ' Voltaire ' resolves itself into ' O alte 
virP (O noble man!) Disraeli bears in his name 
evidence of his capacity for swaying men. ' I lead, 
sir,' is not at all an inaccurate commentary on his 
history. John Abernethy, by anagrammatization, 
is described as 'Johnny the Bear ;' Randle Holmes, 
the author of a book upon the subject of Heraldry, 
'Lo! Men's Herald;' the astronomer, ' moon- 
starer;' telegraph, ' a great help;' astronomers will 
never claim that they have ' no more stars ' to 
examine. 

Of the poet Waller, some brother poet has said : 

" His brows need not with laurel to be bound, 
Since in his name with lawrel is he crowned." 

Cranshawe and Car were great friends, and after 
the death of the former, the latter acted as his post- 
humous editor. While engaged in this work, he 
discovered to his joy that his friend's name could 
be read, 'He was Car.' Touched to find that 
the unity of their thoughts was thus typified by 
their unity of name, he wrote the following lines : 



12 The Secret of Hamlet. 

♦* Was Car then Cranshawe, or was Cranshawe Car, 
Since both within one name combined are? 

'• Yes, Car's Cranshawe, he Car; 'tis love alone 
Which melts two hearts, of both composing one." 

Christianity is accurately described in the words, 
' it's in charity.' 

The old Hebrew augurs, and Plato and the phi- 
losophers who succeeded him, placed great faith in 
the virtue of anagrams ; and the Puritan writer, 
Cotton Mather, writes in a couplet contained in an 
elegy on the death of John Wilson : 

*' His care to guide his flock and feed his lambs. 
By words, works, prayers, psalms, alms, and anagrams." 

The latest illustration of simple reversal is in 
the title of a philosophical work of fiction, entitled 
'Etidorhpa,' — or 'The End of Earth' — a reversal 
of 'Aphrodite,' name of the beautiful sea-born 
being of the Greeks ; and a like inversion of 
method, 'Aphrodite,' or the Pure Love-passion of 
the race, lies hidden as the bottom principle and 
motif of this marvellous story. With this key, 
* Etidorhpa ' is the End of Earth — the summation 
and final fact and principle of all that is to be 
sought for and desired in this human sphere ; Eti- 
dorpha, the beautiful Spirit and Myth of Love. 

So, in 'Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,' Shake- 
speare reveals the motif of the tragedy in the ana- 
grammatized name, ' Hamlet.' 

The esoteric meaning of ' Hamlet ' is explained 
by dividing the word into three parts, for the pur- 
pose of definition, and then replacing the three 



The Secret of Hamlet. 13 

definitions in order. The first part is the letter 
'H.' Its form suggests spirit — being formed by- 
two perpendicular lines ( | | ) , united by one hori- 
zontal line ( — ), and thus forming the letter ' H.* 
It is an ' aspirate ' — a spirate, spirit — equivalent to 
' breath,' life. 

There was a significance in the change of the 
names of Abram and Sarai into Abraham and 
Sarah. It was the addition of the letter h that 
gave the significance, giving a larger meaning to 
the two words, as these two persons, who were 
really one, by faith received more life and char- 
acter than could be defined by the words 'Abram ' 
and ' Sarai.' One of the two ruling consonants 
was taken from the name 'Jehovah,' and added 
to the two names 'Abram' and 'Sarai,' because 
these persons by obedience were made more 
divine. The consona7its contain the meaning of 
words. There is an alphabet of principles as well 
as of forms ; the former is the spirit of the letters. 
"As by the arrangement and rearrangement of the 
signs of the literal alphabet into words, and these 
in turn into sentences, we give an intellectual 
expression to our thought and purpose, so it is pos- 
sible to combine and build into our lives the units 
that compose the Alphabet of Principles. Thus 
will the Word become flesh, and expression be 
given to the thought of God concerning man, that 
creation of Adam in the Divine Mind, perfect 
from the first and yet requiring time and space and 
growth of cell and soul for its evolution or out- 
working." 



14 The Secret of Hamlet. 

As Jehovah gave to Abram a letter from His 
name, signifying imparted thought and life, so 
Shakespeare gave to 'Amleth,' by rearrangement, 
the letter //" from his name, because in the ideal 
Hamlet he put his deepest thought and life into 
the conception of this typical hero. The name and 
form of this letter ZTis that of a w^indow, or place 
through which the light comes, the root and ideal 
meaning of which is to see, to behold — signifying 
Perception, the basis of all knowledge. H^ then, 
is a spirit, with two /'^ — a double consciousness, 
one person. This is Man, a living spirit : two 
selves, a higher and lower self, united in one per- 
sonality. 

The second part of the divided word ' Hamlet ' 
is the little word ' am,' the first person of ' to be,' 
signifying ' being.' 

The third part is the little word ' let ' — to hinder, 
to hold, to restrain ; hindrance. Shakespeare illus- 
trates the meaning of the word when Horatio and 
Marcellus endeavor to keep Hamlet from following 
the ghost : 

*' My fate cries out, 

And makes each petty artery in this body 

As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. 

Still am I called.— Unhand me, gentlemen; 

By Heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me ! 

I say, away! Goon; I'll follow thee." 

This incident is an arcane epitome of the secret 
of Hamlet. Horatio and Marcellus are holding 
the struggling Hamlet, who wants to follow the 
Ghost, the supernatural power whose command is 



The Secret of Hamlet. 15 

law. This is the outward expression of the inner 
struggle that Hamlet experiences when his will is 
influenced by the two selves — the higher and the 
lower self. Tennyson decribes the 'Two Voices,' 
that cry unto Man : 

" A still small voice spake unto me : 
' Thou art so full of misery, 
Were it not better not to be?' 

*' Then to the still small voice I said : 
' Let me not cast in endless shade 
What is so wonderfully made.' " 

Placing these definitions together in order, the 
esoteric meaning of the word ' Hamlet ' is revealed. 
Hamlet is a Player, acting the part of Humanity, 
in a play representing Man's spiritual life struggles 
within the circumscribed conditions of this world, 
under the conscious pressure of the supernatural. 
Man — every man, living, toiling man, who when 
he would do good, has a consciousness of the 
presence of evil : 

"For the good that I would, I do not; but the 
evil which I would not, that I do " — the confession 
of St. Paul's interior life struggle. Shakespeare 
and St. Paul give analogous explanations for the 
contradictions of life. St. Paul explains : 

*' Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, 
but sin that dwelleth in me." 

And Shakespeare causes Hamlet to explain his 
actions to Laertes : 



i6 The Secret of Hamlet. 

"Give me your pardon, sir: I've done you wrong; 
But pardon 't, as you are a gentleman. 
This presence knows, 

And you must needs have heard, how I am punished 
With sore distraction. What I have done. 
That might your nature, honour, and exception 
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. 
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet: 
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, 
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, 
Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it. 
Who does it, then? His madness : if 'the so, 
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd; 
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy." 

And this is Hamlet — Humanity hindered — limi- 
ted by nature ; conscious of the inner struggle be- 
tween the natural and spiritual man ; the inner con- 
flict of Will and Passion. 



MOTTOES. 



Who taught you this? 
i learned it out of women's faces. 

— Shakespeare, *' Winter's Tale." 

Poems are painted window panes. 

If one looks from the square into the church, 

Dusk and dimness are his gains — 

Sir Philistine is left in the lurch; 

The sight, so seen, may well enrage him, 

Nor anything henceforth assuage him. 

But come just inside what conceals ; 
Cross the holy threshold quite — 
All at once 'tis rainbow-bright, 
Device and story flash to light, 
A gracious splendor truth reveals. 
This to God's children is full measure, 
It edifies and gives you pleasure. 

— Goethe. 



(17) 



II. 

THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE. 

Shakespeare represents the human mind as 
lying not under the dominion of one despotic 
propensity, but under a mixed government, in 
which many powers contend for mastery. Accord- 
ing to this view, Hamlet would signify a collection 
of persons — a small village, without a governing 
municipal power. Esoterically, the word would 
signify a collection of faculties and passions — ' out 
of joint ' — a little Cosmos under the co-ordinating 
responsibility and conscious pressure of a larger 
Macrocosm — a mysterions Denmark that holds the 
Prince a prisoner. 

' Denmark is a prison ' — to Hamlet — and this 
Prince, heir apparent to the throne of inner domin- 
ion is really a struggling spirit in a Denmark-body 
of 'too, too solid flesh.' Hamlet is a kingdom 
within, an inner kingdom at war with itself; dif- 
ferent passions and powers desiring to rule. 

" The spiritual ruler within the mind is Reason; 
its executive is the Will ; the subordinate forces are 
the passions, which, like a turbulent democracy, 
determine action by their influence upon the reason 
and the will." Hamlet is only Prince of Denmark 
— not King ; he ought to rule, but he does not. The 
inner throne has no permanent ruler; sometimes 

(i8) 



The Secret of Hamlet. 19 

Reason rules ; then passion ; then some other 
influence ; now conscience, then circumstance ; now 
the potential spiritual man, now the developed 
natural man. 

' Hamlet ' is the tragedy of Doubt, the inner 
tragedy of life, the outer representations of the 
inner struggles of the interior life of Humanity. 
Man is ' out of joint,' his faculties disarranged. 
He is out of harmony with himself ; his will and 
passions contend against his conscience and reason. 
* There is something rotten in the State of Den- 
mark,' something that has disarranged the faculties 
of Man. Man does not obey conscience ; he 
answers in the negative to the divine affirmative 
within ; he chooses the wrong, and thus violates 
the law of his being ; and he thus has a sense of 
ill-desert, and feels that the nature of things is 
against him, and cries : 

*' The time is out of joint — O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right ! " 

But he is born without his consent into this condi- 
tion, and if he would consent to follow the still 
small voice within, he would be led into harmony 
with himself and his environment. In one of his 
sonnets, Shakespeare says : 

•' Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
Fool'd by those rebel powers that thee array, 
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, 
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? 
Why so large cost, having so short a lease. 
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? 
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess. 
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end? 



30 The Secret of Hamlet. 

Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, 

And let that pine to aggravate thy store ; 

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross ; 

Within be fed, without be rich no more; 

So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, 

And death once dead, there's no more dying then." 

" There may be a root of righteousness of life that is 
deeper than the root of evil. Though it be not our discov- 
ery, it may be discovered to us. The conviction of sin may 
come with the conviction of righteousness, and with the 
discrimination of evil, in the judgment, that is, the coming 
of the light." 

' ' Through sin the will is unf ree, and is brought 
into subjection to that which is external, and injury- 
may be done to others in their relations in life. It 
defeats personality, and thwarts the true develop- 
ment of man. From the internal point of view^ 
there are rudiments and survivals in the mind 
which are to be excluded from that 7ne, whose free 
action tends to progress ; that baneful strife tvhick 
lurketh inborn in us is the foe of freedom ; this let 
not a 7nan stir up, but avoid and fee. This is pre- 
sented not only as the result of experience, but as 
the resultant of the knowledge of human nature 
derived from observation. The phrase, which will 
hold its place on historical grounds, as descriptive 
of those forces which hinder from action that me, 
is the bondage of sin. Whatever may be our 
theories, the science of theology asks no more than 
to be supplied with these postulates ; and it may 
hold that something deeper, yes, diviner in that me, 
may be traced beneath rudiments and survivals ; 
and still sin is alie^i to man, as it is an alienation 



The Sec7'et of Hamlet. 21 

from God, and that baneful strife which is a foe to 
freedo7n, which man is to avoid and flee, is another 
conflict than the struggle for existence on this 
earth, and out of it is that freedom wrought, which 
is fulfilled in a life that does not have its consum- 
mation in death." 

When Hamlet confesses that he is mad, he speaks 
of a moral madness. And in approaching the 
causes of his deep thought, and, in the description 
of the internal discord in Hamlet's soul, Shake- 
speare goes deeper than the mere artist ; he reveals 
his own thought, heart, and life, and one can almost 
hear him say: "He that hath known Hamlet's 
secret, hath known Shakespeare's." 

Emerson says : " Shakespeare is the only biogra- 
pher of Shakespeare, and even he can tell nothing, 
except to the Shakespeare in us ; that is, to our 
most apprehensive and sympathetic hour." Again 
he says : "It was not until the nineteenth century, 
whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, 
that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wonder- 
ing readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and 
thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the 
horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see." 

" Hamlet is Man, the ideal type of that wondrous 
assemblage of motive powers which are governed 
by the will." In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare de- 
scribes the struggle of generic man, whose will is 
enforced by the will of the Supernatural Power, 
struggling with the passions of his own nature in 
anarchy, ambition, pride, revenge, love, and the 
whole inner kingdom of passions — crying aloud 
for separate dominion : 



22 The Secret of Hamlet. 

•' Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion, all the interim is 
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
The genius and the moral instruments 
Are then in council : and the state of man, 
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection." 

He who, wearied or stricken in the fight with 
the powers of darkness, asks himself in a solitary- 
place : ' Is it all for nothing? Shall we, indeed, 
be overthrown ? ' he does find something which 
may justify that thought. In such a moment of 
utter sincerity, when a man has bared his owm soul 
before the immensities and eternities, a presence in 
which his own poor personality is shriveled into 
nothingness arises within him, and says as plainly 
as words can say : ' I am w^ith thee, and I am 
greater than thou.' It may not concern one what 
name, of many names, is given to this presence, if 
it be not a mere word for which there is no reality, 
and if it be not merely identified with the epheme- 
ral life of humanity ; if it be a presence in and 
with personality ; and if the personality of man be 
not brought to nothingness, but lifted up, from 
among the things which pass into nothingness, into 
strength and freedom. "The deity in our bo- 
soms," says Gervinus, " Shakespeare has bestowed 
with intentional distinctne&s, even upon his most 
abandoned villains, and that, too, when they deny 
it. To nourish this spark, and not to quench it, is 
the loud sermon of all his works." 

" The burden of the imposed law of authority for 



The Secret of Hamlet. 23 

the government of human actions is not in the 
straitness of the law, but in ourselves ; every law, 
human or divine, must be weak through the flesh. 
So long as we are merely trying to obey a rule, we 
find that rule a burden ; but when we claim our 
rights as new men, as created in Christ to good 
works, as children of a Father in Heaven, we be- 
come united with Him from whom laws proceed. 
Obedience to them is recognized as a part of our 
constitution ; disobedience is the unnatural, mis- 
erable state." 

Hamlet's unconscious cry is the cry of Humanity 
for an absent Father ; it is the old desire of nations 
for deliverance; for Christ, the Son of Man, in 
whom may be seen the Father. When there comes 
to the conscience the revelation of a reconciled and 
reconciling God, of one who has manifested his 
only begotten Son, bearing the burden which we 
could not bear, taking away the sin, the moral 
' madness ' of the world, all is changed. That 
which was sought in nothingness is found in a 
Father. The death of self is the beginning of a 
new life, of affections, energies, memories, hopes. 

" There need be no disappointed ambition," says 
Maudsley, " if a man were to set before himself a 
true aim in life, and to work definitely for it ; no 
envy, if he considered that it mattered not whether 
he did a certain great thing, or some one else, if 
only it were done ; no grief from loss of fortune, 
if he estimated at its true value that which fortune 
can bring him, and that which fortune can never 



24 The Secret of Ha7nlet. 

bring him ; no wounded self-love, if he had learned 
well the eternal lesson of life — self-renunciation." 
***** 
Not only has Shakespeare veiled the meaning of 
' Hamlet,' in the name of the Prince ; but he gives 
corroborating intimations in the preparation and 
setting of the stage. He does this in a number of 
his plays. In ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' the 
place prophetic of the whole is a midnight wood, a 
scene which all call a midsummer night's dream. 
In 'As You Like It,' it is a daylight wood, with 
spring breezes moving the half-clothed boughs ; a 
scene and time about as one likes to see and enjoy. 
In ' The Tempest ' it is a single weird island, 
thrown into relief by the mysterious sea horizon, a 
place suggestive of occult powers and persons. In 
ji7ie^ Shakespeare sets every moral action into a 
framework of corresponding physical likeness. 
The tempest in King Lear's heart is linked to the 
tempest of the elements ; the moonlight and the 
distant music have a logical relation to the lovers' 
hearts. In ' Macbeth ' the witches on the lonely 
heath in 'fog and foul air,' are close to nature. 
They begin their weird chant with ' Fair is foul, 
and foul is fair,' in her indifference. They throw 
into their seething cauldron, 

"Eye of newt and toe of frog, 
Wool of bat and tongue of dog, 
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting." 

Macbeth calls to them out of the course of nature 
in the same tone of moral indifference. Thus, 
throughout, Shakespeare throws back into the 



The Secret of Hamlet. 35 

physical world the reflections of the moral acts 
done within it, because he sees that in and behind 
the physical there is a moral order on which they 
repose. 

Nature is the expression of moral realities ; the 
physical is environed and contained by the spiritual. 
The whole relation of man to nature runs up into 
morals for its explanation : the uniformity of 
natural law, when brought into contact with the 
free will of man, means a fixed moral habit ; his 
recurring natural wants tend to fix him in wise and 
orderly ways that are more and higher than physi- 
cal customs ; the uniformity of nature's forces and 
operations have not only a moral significance, but 
become sources and educators of moral habits. 
Man is thus being trained as a moral being into a 
certain affinity with the courses of nature ; the stars 
rise and set in him ; the steadiness of gravitation is 
reduced to a moral equivalent in his obedient heart. 
This steadfast environment of natural law is simply 
a plan and method, so far as it goes, for getting 
man into a corresponding moral state — uniform but 
free, and so tending to produce a fixed yet free 
character, brought up at last to the nature of God 
whose perfect freedom finds expression in the 
uniformity of his laws. 

Nature is the stage setting of the Eternal Dram- 
aturgist ; the history of mankind, a vast and 
sublime drama written in the invisible regions, and 
enacted on earth, not by fictitious representations, 
but through real events ; the personages of the 
drama of life are true kings, emperors, heroes, and 



26 The Secret of Hamlet, 

nations; the duels and gladiatorial fights are 
gigantic wars : the object of these scenic represen- 
tations is not an idle amusement of the spectators, 
but the lasting benefit and improvement of the 
human race. In this Drama of Life, Man hears 
the command of his Father's Spirit imposing upon 
him the commands of human duty ; and his life is 
a struggling, hindered life, a conflict between Law 
and Love. He is a Prince, and may be King, the 
lower self crucified and dead, the true self may 
then exercise dominion. 

In ' Hamlet,' the visible stage slopes off into the 
misty infinite, with a grey starless heaven over- 
head, and Hades beneath ; the invisible world 
painted in to complete the picture. 

In the opening scene of ' Hamlet ' — the opening 
scene of Life — the reality or the Supernatural is 
manifested, and its effect is apparent in every word 
and movement of the characters. There is an air 
of mystery and a suggestion of awe in the opening 
scene, revealing a representation of Elsinore, with 
the agitated sentinel moving back and forth upon 
the platform before the Castle. This is the physi- 
cal and spiritual environment — the external coun- 
terpart — of the inner mystery of Hamlet's soul. 
He is in midnight darkness of mystery ; conscious 
of the supernatural and affrighted with the ghostly 
fears and suspicious thoughts, and feelings that 
move across the inner stage of his heart. Francisco 
reveals the inner feelings of Hamlet in the words, 

♦• * * 'tis bitter cold, 
And I am sick at heart." 

And then, "The keynote of the tragedy is struck 



The Secret of Hamlet, 27 

in the simple preludings of this common sentry's 
midnight guard, to sound afterwards in ever- 
spreading vibration through the complicated 
though harmonious strains of Hamlet's own watch 
through a darker and colder night than the senses 
can feel." 

** Sick art thou — a divided will 
Still heaping on the fear of ill 
The fear of men, a coward still." 
***** 

'* Who forged that other influence, 
That heat of inward evidence, 
By which he doubts against the sense?" 
***** 

"' Ah ! sure within him and without. 
Could his dark wisdom find it out, 
There must be answer to his doubt." 



MOTTOES. 



* * Foul deeds will rise, 
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. 



The one remains ; the many change and pass ; 
Heaven's light forever shines; earth's shadows fly; 
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
Until death tramples it to fragments. 

— Shelley, *'Adonais." 



Time's glory is to calm contending kings. 
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light, 
To stamp the seal of time in aged things, 
To wake the morn and sentinel the night. 
To vjrong the "wronger till he render right; 
To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, 
And smear with dust their glittering golden towers. 
— Shakespeare, ** Rape of Lucrece." 



* * 'tis bitter cold, 

And I am sick at heart. 



(28) 



III. 

THE APPARITION. 

The High Priest of English Literature has 
introduced the subject of his thought, Man — ideal, 
composite man — in the play of ' Hamlet.' It is a 
representation of Man conscious of himself — his 
higher and lower self; conscious of the world, not 
himself — the spiritual and natural world ; and real- 
izing that the higher and lower self are one person- 
ality ; so the world of spirit and of nature are one 
world. Hamlet represents the natural man under 
the conscious pressure and power of the spirit 
world : a human subject of Divine law, naturally 
' proud, revengeful, and ambitious.' He is the 
Player, the Actor of Humanity ; the Revealer of 
Shakespeare's conception of spiritual Man. He is 
not a person, but a human instrument, a typical 
vehicle for the expression of Shakespeare's final, 
deepest view of life and destiny. 

In 'King Lear,' Gloucester and Edmund repre- 
sent respectively the old and the new faith of 
Astrology ; so in all the writings of Shakespeare 
his character and personal beliefs are revealed 
through and represented by his noble characters. 
But although everywhere felt, he is nowhere seen 
in his plays. As he played the part of the Ghost 
in Hamlet, so he is the spirit of all his creations, 

(29) 



30 The Secret of Hamlet. 

yet only appears occasionally, in his personal form 
of belief and character. 

An author is like in character the character he 
causes us to love ; and the character of the litera- 
sure produced at different periods of the author's 
life. " As Shakespeare advances in years he 
dwells upon the Unseen : conscience, personal 
responsibility, the moral law, the great characters 
of his tragedies ; and less and less, except as a foil, 
upon the lower traits and the coarser in human 
nature." 

We love Hamlet, that concrete ' balanced criti- 
cism of high intellectual power and subtle intensi- 
ties of emotion not conjoined with sufficient execu- 
tive capacity ; ' love Ophelia, and Horatio ; but can 
we love Claudius, Polonius, or even Gertrude? 
His faith is thus expressed in his Will: " I com- 
mend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, 
hoping and assuredly believing, through the only 
merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made 
partaker of life everlasting." 

***** 

The rumor of the apparition, the appearance of 
the Ghost, is wrapped in the larger rumor of war. 
Preparations for attack fill the ears of ' the subject 
of the land.' Claudius, the new king, has com- 
passed his election, married the widow of his 
brother, and the Court is overwhelmed with shame. 
Hamlet has returned from Wittenberg College, and 
is agitated, sorrowful, and horrified at the changes 
wrought by time. 

The common * honest soldier,' Francisco— the 



The Secret of Hainlet. 31 

chorus of Hamlet's heart — does not see the ghost 
of the former King. The officers, Marcellus and 
Bernardo, near the late King — the elder Hamlet — 
have 'twice seen' the 'dreaded sight.' They 
keep the news from those in station below them ; 
will not, for reasons sufficiently obvious, speak of 
the matter to King Claudius, Gertrude the Queen, 
or Polonius the Lord Chamberlain. They hesitate 
to tell Hamlet, whom they love, and believe should 
be the occupant of the throne of Denmark, until 
they are thoroughly convinced that it is not their 
' fantasy.' 

To satisfy themselves and to convince Horatio, 
the friend of Hamlet, Marcellus takes him at mid- 
night to watch with Bernardo, and says to his 
fellow-officer : 

" Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy, 
And will not let belief take hold of him 
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us ; 
Therefore I have entreated him along 
With us to watch the minutes of this night, 
That if again this apparition comes, 
He may approve our eyes and speak to it." 

" Horatio. Tush, tush, 'twill not appear. 

Bernardo. Sit down awhile; 
And let us once again assail your ears, 
That are so fortified against our story, 
What we two nights have seen." 

" Horatio. Well, sit we down, 
And let us hear Bernardo speak of this. 

Bernardo. Last night of all. 
When yon same star that's westward from the pole 
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven 
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, 
The bell then beating one " 



32 The Secret of Hamlet. 

The Ghost appears in the figure of the dead King. 
Horatio, the scholar skeptic, though harassed with 
' fear and wonder,' challenges the apparition. It 
makes no answer, seems ' offended ' and disappears. 
Appearing again, and challenged again by Horatio 

*• It lifted up its head, and did address 
Itself to motion, like as it would speak; " 

But the gaoler cock calls him and the kingly form 



And then 



Started like a guilty thing 
Upon a fearful summons; " 

Shrunk in haste away, 

And vanished from our sight.' 



What a sorrowful Ghost ! He seeks his student- 
son Hamlet : he, and he alone, remains true to his 
memory. A loving memory makes it possible for 
Hamlet to hear his voice ; besides he can not trust 
any of his court. Only Hamlet may hear his 
message. Not Gertrude : " She has built a door- 
less, windowless wall between them, and sees the 
husband of her youth no more. Outside her 
heart — that is the night in which he wanders, 
while the palace windows are flaring, and the low 
wind throbs to the wassail shouts; within, his 
murderer sits by the v>^ife of his bosom, and in the 
orchard the spilt poison is yet gnawing at the roots 
of the daisies." No, the Ghost can see Gertrude, 
but he can not show himself to her. Even the 
anxious mourner does not always behold the spectre 
of the beloved dead. No sorrow is more common 
than the affliction of Margaret as described by 
Wadsworth : 



The Secret of Hamlet. 33 

•' 'Tis falsely said 
That there was ever intercourse 
Betwixt the living and the dead, 
For surelj then I should have sight 
Of him I wait for day and night 

With love and longings infinite." 

Other conditions are necessary in order to see 
beyond the veil : 

" Dare I say 
No spirit ever brake the band 
That stays him from the native land, 

Where first he walked when clasped in clay? 

No visual shade of some one lost, 

But he, the Spirit himself, may come 
Where all the nerve of sense so numb; 

Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost. 
***** 

How pure at heart and sound in head 
With what divine affections bold 
Should be the man whose thought would hold 

An hour's communion with the dead. 

In vain shalt thou, or any, call 

The spirits from their golden day, 
Except like them, thou too canst say, 

My spirit is at peace with all. 

They haunt the silence of the breast, 
Imaginations calm and fair. 
The memory like a cloudless air, 

The conscience as a sea at rest: 

But when the heart is full of din, 

And doubt beside the portal waits, 
They can but listen at the gates. 
And hear the household jar within." 

The Ghost of the murdered King seeks revenge 
— the revenge of a king and a Dane rather than 
of a w^ronged man. He calls for public justice : 
3 



34 The Secret of Hamlet. 

not individual vengeance. The royal throne of 
Denmark is occupied by a usurper, and the royal 
bed has become dishonored. To put an end to 
this the Ghost would bring the murderer to justice. 
Death is a revealer of secrets ! There is a 
deeper, personal wrong, for which he seeks no 
revenge : it involves his wife ; and love desires only 
the repentance more needful to the wronger than 
the wronged. The Ghost charges Gertrude with 
unfaithfulness, as the root of all his woes : 

*' Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, 

With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, 
(O wucked wit and gifts that have the power 
So to seduce !) won to his shameful lust 
The will of my most seeming virtuous queen." 

The fall of Gertrude was the beginning of all 
his sorrows: "Through her his life was dis- 
honored and his death violent and premature ; un- 
huzeled, disappointed, unaneled, he woke to the 
air — not of his orchard blossoms, but of a prison 
house, the lightest word of whose terrors would 
freeze the blood of the listener." 

Love — love stronger than death dictates this 
charge concerning the faithless Gertrude : 

" Leave her to heaven. 
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, 
To prick and sting her." 

' Leave her to heaven,' says Shakespeare, for well 
he knows that if the fact without the form of 
marriage, exists before 



The Secret of Hainlet. 35 

" All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
With full and holy rite be ministered, 
No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall 
To make this contract grow ; but barren hate, 
Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestow 
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly 
That you shall hate it both; therefore take heed 
As Hymen's lamps shall light you." 

And what tenderness causes the Ghost to exact, 
with fourfold repetition, silence from Horatio and 
Marcellus. 

Poor Ghost — aerial, shadowy — the veiled form 
of an almost ineffaceable sorrow ! He no more 
appears in armor upon the walls, but in his gown 
and in Gertrude's closet. This is his last appear- 
ance. Invisible, yet he listens to the conversation 
of Hamlet and Gertrude ; mistakes the tenor of her 
looks ; fears the consequences, yet he can not com- 
fort her; dares not, if he could, appear to her; the 
thought of him is her one despair. The dread 
command of the Ghost to Hamlet unexecuted as 
yet, is only referred to by the apparition, visible to 
Hamlet, invisible to Gertrude : 

** Do not forget this visitation 

Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. 
But, look, amazement on thy mother sits ; 
O, step between her and her fighting soul; 
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. 
Speak to her, Hamlet." 

Poor Ghost! hindered, in his prison, can not — nay 
dare not speak to Gertrude ; he must trust all things 
to his hindered son still in the flesh, and who, like 



^6 The Secret of Hamlet. 

the elder Hamlet, dare not tell the secrets of his 
earthy prison house. 

"For a few moments, sadly regardful of the 
two, he stands — while his son seeks in vain to 
reveal to his mother the presence of his father — a 
few moments of piteous action, all but ruining the 
remnant of his son's sorely harassed self-possession 
— his whole concern his wife's distress, and neither 
his own doom nor his son's duty; then, as if lost in 
despair at the impassable gulf betwixt them, re- 
vealed by her utter incapacity for even the imagi- 
nation of his proximity, he turns away, and steals 
out at the portal. Will his love ever lift him above 
the pain of its loss? Will eternity ever be bliss, 
ever be endurable to poor King Hainlet? And 
Gertrude, will the fires ever cleanse her? These 
questions await an answer that must not fall on 
ears of flesh and blood." 



MOTTOES. 



He is the half part of a blessed man, 
Left to be finished by such as she ; 
And she a fair divided excellence 
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. 

— Shakespeare, '* King John." 



Crushed hopes, 
Blighted affections, benefits forgot, 
A broken heart, and an untimely grave, 
These form no wondrous tale : 'tis trite and common. 
The lot of many, most of all of those 
Who learn to crowd into a few brief years 
Ages of feeling; as the o'er-charged pulse 
Throbs high, and throbs no more i 



(37) 



IV. 
HAMLET AND OPHELIA. 

' Hamlet ' is a part of the ' book of life ; ' a 
mysterious preparatory chapter of universal human 
experience. His college training at Wittenberg 
has not prepared him for life. At his ' commence- 
ment ' he enters the University of Life, and begins 
the hard struggle with the curricula of personal 
experience. Experience is the great teacher of 
Life : to touch the world at many points ; to come 
into relation with many kinds of men ; to think, to 
feel, and to act on a generous scale — these are 
prime opportunities for growth. Shakespeare had 
not only a deep knowledge of man, but knowledge 
of men as ^vell. 

Coleridge thought that the character of Hamlet 
could be traced to his deep and accurate science in 
mental philosophy, and that in order to understand 
him it was essential to reflect on the constitution of 
the human mind. 

One must not, however, become the victim of 
mere meditation, and lose the natural power of 
action. *'The arts and sciences," says Winslow, 
" alone have never yet civilized a nation, for they 
are the products, and not the causes, of national 
superiority. Moreover, the}^ concern the intellect 
rather than the morals. Unhappily it must be 



The Secret of Hamlet. 39 

owned that piety, virtue, and self-control are not 
the constant attendants of learning or splendid 
genius. Something more potent than the mere 
intellectual culture is required to be put in force 
for the purpose of regulating the conduct of a 
responsible being with a free will, like man, safely 
across the stormy sea of life, from birth to death. 
The moral sciences alone touch the relationships of 
life. The intellectual is manifestly subordinate to 
the spiritual. The spiritual prepares the way for 
the intellectual, as the morning foreruns the day. 
Without the supernatural gift of faith, the mind is 
nothing but a hopeless mass of scientific darkness 
and moral impurity, in continual conflict with 
itself." 

The Wittenberg College only instructed its 
scholars ; it did not — could not educate them. 
Hamlet was well instructed ; he was poorly edu- 
cated ; for nothing is more dangerous than knowl- 
edge to the mind without the capacity to make a 
proper use of it. "An education that merely 
instructs will encourage crime," continues Wins- 
low. " One which co-ordinates the faculties of the 
mind, which gives exercise to reason and judgment, 
at the same time that it represses without ignoring 
the instinctive part of man's nature, will elevate 
his position in the scale of the creation, and turn 
those faculties to the services of his fellow 
creatures which otherwise would be employed to 
their destruction." If the emotions be constantly 
trampled down, and invariably subordinated to 
reason, they will in time assert their claims, and 



40 The Secret of Hamlet. 

break forth in insanity or crime; if they be con- 
stantly indulged, the result will probably be the 
same. *' Teach a man his duty to God, as well as 
his obligations to his fellow men ; lead him to 
believe that his life is not his own ; that disappoint- 
ment and misery are the penalty of Adam's trans- 
gression, and one from which there is no hope of 
escaping ; and, above all, inculcate a resignation to 
the decrees of Divine Providence. When life 
becomes a burden, when the mind is sinking under 
the weight of accumulated misfortune and no 
gleam of hope penetrates through the vista of 
futurity to gladden the heart, the intellect says : 
* Commit suicide, and escape from a world of 
wretchedness and woe.' The moral principle says : 
' Live ; it is your duty to bear with resignation the 
afflictions that overv/helm you ; let the moral influ- 
ence of your example be reflected in the characters 
of those by whom you are surrounded.' " 

Hamlet is a protest against the exclusive cultiva- 
tion of the intellect, and a plea for co-ordinate heart 
and head education. 



Hamlet charges his habit of delay to 

** Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on the event." 

The ' craven scruple ' — the conscience which 
renders him a coward — is the cause ; the oblivion is 
the effect. Inaction affords relief to doubt, and 
Hamlet desires to be sure he is right before he acts ; 
whenever events convince, he is ready and willing 
to act. 



The Secret of Hamlet. 41 

The subject of the play of Hamlet is the burden 
of the mystery of life, and therefore the character 
of Hamlet is purposely a mystery. Life must be 
lived to be explained. 

Goethe thought that Shakespeare meant to repre- 
sent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul 
unfit for the performance of it. It is true that 
action in the form of deliberate revenge is to Hamlet 
a questionable duty, peculiarly antipathetic to his 
nature. But the great author of ' Wilhem Meister ' 
' looks too precisely ' on this view and fails to realize 
that, with Hamlet — 

" The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right." 

He recognizes that this world is one of moral 
confusion and obscurity : especially the tiine in 
which he is called ' to set it right.' 

He is in love with Ophelia, and the two lovers 
are in harmony with one another and with the 
purest and highest impulses of their own hearts. 
They are a pair of ' star-crossed lovers,' like Romeo 
and Juliet^ who fell in an unequal strife, from the 
circumstances of the outer world. Hamlet strug- 
gles betwixt love and duty ; his malady is as deep- 
seated in his sensibilites and in his heart as it is in 
his brain. His intellect, however, together with 
his deep and abiding sense of the moral qualities of 
things, distinguishes him from Romeo. 

Hamlet is quite different at the end of his short 
life from what he was at the beginning of his real 
life — which began at the opening of the play. He 
is now in years of full manhood, a student of phi- 



42 The Secret of Hamlet. 

losophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on the 
things of life and death, cultured in everything 
except the culture of active life. He is Shakespeare's 
ideal man ; the beloved son of his genius, intro- 
duced to the world through the baptism of a great 
suffering — the death of his father — and driven into 
the wilderness of life's temptations by the super- 
natural voice from the spirit world, with its revela- 
tion of horror, and command of revenge for the 
dishonored majesty of Denmark. 

When Horatio, a fellow student and friend of 
Hamlet, tells him of the apparition of his father, 
the strong will of the hero speaks : 

'* If it assume mj noble father's presence, 
I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape 
And bid me hold my peace.'* 

He keeps his resolution, for against the vehement 
protestations of his friends he not only speaks to 
the Ghost, but follows it : 

" My fate cries out, 
And makes each petty artery in this body 
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. 
Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen ! 
By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that let's me ! 
I say away! — Go on; I'll follow thee." 

The Ghost, who has a message for Hamlet only, 
leads him to a secluded place and reveab the start- 
ling truth of the unnatural alliance and murder, 
coupled with the command of revenge, with these 
restrictions : 

** But, however thou pursuest this act, 

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
Against thy mother aught." 



The Secret of Hajnlet. 43 

The supernatural will and command strengthens 
the strong will of Hamlet, and he swears to per- 
form the commandment for revenge and to forget 
all things else : 

" Remember thee! 
Yea from the table of my memory 
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, 
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, 
That youth and observation copied there ; 
And thy commandment all alone shall live 
Within the book and volume of my brain, 
Unmixed with baser matter." 

Horatio and Marcellus who have followed Ham- 
let in fear, endeavor to get the revelation of the 
Ghost, but Hamlet, who is strangely wrought upon 
by the interview, desires solitude and time in order 
to think out the method to pursue in fulfilling the 
command of the Ghost : how he can accomplish 
the mandate, without ' contriving aught ' against 
his mother, and without ' tainting his mind.' He 
feels his helplessness and need of prayer, and that 
he must be about his father's business, which to 
him has now become a duty — a duty that contends 
against desire. To the entreaty of his friends for 
the secret of the Ghost, he says : 

" And so, without more circumstances at all, 
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part ; 
Tou^ as your business and desire shall point you, 
For every man has business and desire, 
Such as it is ; and for mine own poor part, 
Look you, I'll go pray." 

He feels that he can not go about his ' business and 
desire,' except through the way of prayer. Ham- 



44 The Secret of Hamlet. 

let has met before this, another spirit — for to him 
Ophelia has not 'always lived upon the earth.' 
He is a prince, an uncrowned king ; she his other 
self, an uncrowned queen ; but from their first 
meeting, these two have changed eyes. 

** He is the half part of a blessed man, 
Left to be finished by such as she ; 
And she a fair divided excellence 
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him." 

We do not see Hamlet as a lover, nor as Ophelia 
first beheld him ; for the days when he importuned 
her with love were before the opening of the 
drama, before his father's spirit revisited the earth ; 
but we behold him at once in a sea of trouble, of 
perplexities, of agonies, of terrors. Without 
remorse he endures all its horrors ; without guilt he 
endures all its shame. He hates the crime he is 
called upon to revenge ; revenge is abhorrent to his 
nature, and he is consequently at strife with him- 
self ; the supernatural visitation has perturbed his 
soul to its inmost depths ; all things else, all inter- 
ests, all hopes, all affections, appear as futile, when 
the majestic shadow comes lamenting from its 
place of torment ' to shake him with thoughts 
beyond the reaches of his soul ! ' 

His love for Ophelia, so utterly hopeless now ; 
the grief of circumstances so wide and deep be- 
tween them. He can not link his terrible destiny 
with hers ; his great love forbids it : he can not re- 
veal to het" — young, gentle, and innocent as she is — 
the terrific influences which have changed the 
whole current of his life and purposes. In his 



The Secret of Hamlet. 4^ 

distraction he overacts the painful part to which he 
had tasked himself; he is like that judge of the 
Areopagus who, being occupied with graver mat- 
ters, flung from him. the little bird which had 
sought refuge in his bosom, and with such angry- 
violence that unwittingly he killed it. 

***** 
Laertes, the brother of Ophelia, reveals his char- 
acter by his warning judgment against Hamlet : 

** For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour, 
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, 
A violet in the youth of primj nature, 
Forward, not permanent; sweet, not lasting; 
The perfume and suppliance of a minute ; 
No more." 

She replies in a tone of surprise : 

** No more, but so? 
Laertes. Think it no more. 
***** 
Perhaps he loves you now, 
And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch 
The virtue of his will ; but you must fear, 
His greatness weighed, his -will is not his oivn. 
For he himself is subject to his birth." 

Immediately following this warning, the com- 
mands of Polonius are received by Ophelia. 
Polonius, the fault-finder in age — too often the 
fault-doer in youth and manhood — with his world- 
ly-wise maxims substantially forbids her ' from this 
time forth,' to receive or even talk with ' the Lord 
Hamlet.' 

'* Ophelia. I shall obey, my lord." 



46 The Secret of Hamlet. 

Two months have passed — years almost to Ham- 
let and Ophelia. Hamlet, to all save Horatio, is 
mad — insane. There is, however, a ' method in 
his madness.' He has, as the only fitting thing, 
concluded to veil himself in mystery, waiting, 
hoping, suffering, till his hour comes for action. 

Before the interview with the Ghost, he was 
filled with suspicion, shame, and grief, with 
' vailed lids,' longing to commune with his father, 
and ascertain in advance the secrets behind the 
scenery of nature and the grave. His mother 
thus entreats him : 

** Do not forever with thy vailed lids 
Seek for thy noble father in the dust." 

Poor Hamlet, he hovered about the tomb of his 
father, like his father's Ghost hovered about the 
Royal Castle of Elsinore. And in his loneliness, 
uncertainty, grief, and despair, he cries out in 
agonizing soliloquy : 

"O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, 
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! 
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! 
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 
Seem to me all the uses of this world ! " 

Referring to his mother, he cries : 

'* Frailty, thy name is woman ! " 

And expressing his fears and agony, concludes : 

** It is not, nor it can not come to good ; 
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue." 

Hamlet could scarcely bear the presence of his 



The Secret of Hamlet. 4-7 

Uncle Claudius, and since the revelation of the 
Ghost confirming his suspicions as felt by his ' pro- 
phetic soul,' he resolves to appear more strange, 
veiling his thoughts, purposes, and condition from 
all save Horatio : for how else could he now de- 
mean himself in the presence of the King and 
Queen, and besides, it might prove advantageous to 
him, and seemed to have the sanction of the Ghost ; 
for he says : 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

But come; 

Here, as before, never, so help you Mercy, 

How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, 

And perchance hereafter shall think meet 

To put an antic disposition on, 

That you, at such time seeing me, never shall, 

With arms encumber'd thus, or this head shake; 

Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase. 

As ' Well, well, we know,' or ' We could, an if we would ;' 

Or * If we list to speak,' or * There be an if they might,' 

Or such ambiguous giving-out, to note 

That you know aught of me : this not to do, 

So Grace and Mercy at your most need help you. 

Swear. 

'■'■ Ghost. {Beneath.) Swear." 

***** 
And poor Ophelia ! how she has struggled with 
love and duty ; the command of her father and her 
fear of her lover's insanity, and her love for him, 
that longs to hear his voice, share his sufferings, 
but can not. Conscious of Hamlet's loneliness, 
by her own sympathetic feeling, and knowing that 
in the lobby he walks, 'for hours together,' 



48 The Secret of Hamlet, 

hoping as she believes to see her, his ' rose of 
May,' who has received his letters and his ' solicit- 
ings, as they fell out by time, by means, and place,' 
but refused to answer them, denying her lover in- 
terviews, or even explanations of her changed be- 
havior. Hamlet realizes that it is because of her 
father's influence, suggested it may be by Claudius ; 
but his deepest sorrow results from the belief that 
Ophelia doubts his love, which to the sensitive na- 
ture of the Prince is more than an imputation of 
his honor ; and this from her is almost unbearable, 
and he closes one of his letters in his manner of ex- 
temporizing poetry as follows : 

** Doubt thou the stars are fire; 
Doubt that the sun doth move ; 
Doubt truth to be a liar ; 
But never doubt I love. 
'* O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. 
I have not art to reckon my groans ; but that 
I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu. 
'* Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is 
to him, Hamlet." 

This was evidently Hamlet's last letter to Ophe- 
lia, and in it he in despair takes leave of her in the 
word ' Adieu.' Days pass, and no response, and 
at last, in desperation, he forces himself into her 
presence. 

** Lord Hamlet — with his doublet all unbrac'd; 
No hat upon his head ; his stockings foul'd, 
Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ankle; 
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other; 
And with a look so piteous in purport 
As if he had been loosed out of hell 
To speak of horrors — he comes before me." 



772^ Secret of Hamlet. 49 

*■'■ Polonius. Mad for thy love. 

Ophelia. My Lord, I do not know ; 
But truly I do fear it. 

Polonius. What said he .? 

Ophelia. He took me by the wrist and held me hard ; 
Then goes he to the length of all his arm, 
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow. 
He falls to such perusal of my face 
As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so ; 
At last, a little shaking of my arm, 
And thrice his head thus waving up and down. 
He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound 
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk 
And end his being: that done, he let me go; 
And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd, 
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; 
For out o' doors he went without their help, 
And, to the last, bended their light on me." 

What a picture of the struggle of Hamlet's love 
as it sought to change the purpose of his soul, in 
the execution of his father's command. His knees 
knocking each other! Is this the same Hamlet 
who firmly followed the beckoning Ghost? What 
a f hange ! ' ' There is more than the love of forty 
thousand brothers in that hand grasp of the wrist, 
in that long gaze at arm's length, in that force that 
might but will not draw her nearer. And never a 
word from this king of words ! His first great si- 
lence ; the second is his death." 

***** 

He leaves her, as she had left him, without a 
word of explanation. A father's command, en- 
forced by fears and suspicions, are the cause of 
that action of Hamlet and Ophelia, each toward 
the other. 
4 



MOTTO. 



" Two shall be born the whole wide world apart, 
And speak in different tongues and have no thought 
Each of the other's being and no heed; 
And these o'er unknown seas to unknown lands 
Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death ; 
And all unconsciously, shape every act 
And bend each wandering step to the one end — 
That one day, out of darkness, they shall meet 
And read life's meaning in each other's eyes. 



And two shall walk some narrow way of life 

So nearly side by side that, should one turn 

Ever so little pace to right or left. 

They needs must stand acknowledged face to face ; 

And yet, with wistful eyes that never meet, 

With groping hands that never clasp, and lips 

Calling in vain to ears that never hear, 

They seek each other all their weary days, 

And die unsatisfied — and this is fate !" 



{501 



HAMLET AND OPHELIA (Continued). 

Shakespeare does not attempt to describe the 
scene in which Hamlet gazes with hypnotic glare 
into the face of the pure Ophelia. Only those 
who have partially experienced the malady of 
these two lovers could possibly understand the 
description, even if it were possible to translate the 
heart, and give sighs, tones, and looks expression 
in words. What would Shakespeare's description 
be to 'the million' but 'words, words, words?' 
And so, he reports it in the impassioned speech of 
Ophelia to her father, in explanation of her 
' affrighted looks.' What a struggle in the silent 
gaze of these two lovers, as they looked long into 
each other's eyes, across the deep wide gulf of 
outward circumstances that separated them, hope- 
lessly, so far as this world was concerned. Each 
thinks the other to blame : Ophelia doubting Ham- 
let's love and believing him insane ; Hamlet, because 
of the Ghost's revelations, doubting womankind, 
and fearing the atmosphere in which Ophelia lives 
has contaminated 'the rose of May.' Ophelia's 
attitude toward Hamlet is just as inexplicable to 
him, as his actions are inexplicable toward Ophelia. 

The struggle of the strong, subtile power of 
silent looks is most suggestive. There is the reve- 

(51) 



52 The Secret of Hamlet. 

lation of purpose, power, and character in a look. 
There are glances shot from human eyes that 
trouble the beholder ! Guilt and dissimulation can 
not bear the lingering, inquiring gaze of innocence 
and purity. And what a power is there in a look 
when grief turns to anger ; when ' despised love ' 
itself becomes wrath ! 

What marshalled forces struggle in life's con- 
flicts, revealing themselves on the battle ground of 
the human countenance — that weird ' changeful 
symbol which God has hung in front of the unseen 
spirit.' It is possible that Shakespeare intended 
to give a sequel to Hamlet, following the fortunes 
of the chief characters across the borderland of 
this world ; but if he could not describe the meet- 
ing of these two spirits in the struggle for suprem- 
acy in this silent battle of love, agony, misunder- 
standing, and despair, how could he attempt a 
description of their meeting in that ' undiscovered 
country,' beyond the grave? As it is, we are left 
to imagine the struggle of inner glory as it trans- 
figured the faces of the two lovers in their uncon- 
scious conflict. 

Dante says of Beatrice, as he saw her in the Par- 
adiso, that — 

♦' She smiled so joyously, 
That God seemed in her countenance to rejoice." 

And his philosophy accounts for the external glory 
as the expression of an internal spiritual effulgence. 
It is the angel face in flesh and blood rarely, yet at 
times met by those who have eyes to see. The 



The Seci'et of Hamlet. 53 

radiance in Ophelia's face that finally overawed 
Hamlet, can not be counterfeited. It was superior 
to aesthetic or intellectual luminosity ; there was no 
earthly look in it — all the higher faculties led by 
conscience, harmoniously blended in the composite 
look, that shines through the beautiful form of her 
heaven-lighted face. 

No wonder that the ' look so piteous in purport,' 
of Hamlet, quailed before the look of injured 
innocence, conscious purity, and wounded love of 
Ophelia. No wonder her gaze transfixed at the 
distance of 'the length of all his arm,' silently 
with such ' perusal ' of her ' face as he would draw 
it.' No wonder ' he raised a sigh so piteous and 
profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and 
end his being.' No wonder he loosed his grasp, 

" And with his head over his shoulder turn'd, 
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; 
For out o' doors he went without their helps, 
And, to the last, bended their light on me." 

What mysterious somnambulistic power ; but the 
light in the face of Ophelia outshone and van- 
quished the light in the face of Hamlet the Dane. 
***** 

The mind of Hamlet after the silent struggle 
with Ophelia, when he in a state of somnambulism 
entered her apartment unannounced, can not better 
be described than he does in his famous soliloquy. 
The King who fears his ' turbulent and dangerous 
lunacy,' consents to the plan of Polonius, whereby 
Hamlet is to meet Ophelia in order that the King 
and Polonius ' may of their encounter frankly 



54 The Secret of Hamlet. 

judge, and gather by him as he is behaved, if 't be 
the afflictions of his love or no that thus he suffers.' 
Ophelia, at the suggestion of her father, pretends 
to be reading a book, while the King and Polonius 
are hid from view, but in hearing. Hamlet, ob- 
livious of the presence of any one, soliloquizes : 

** To be or not to be — that is the question : 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
And by opposing end them? To die — to sleep- 
No more ; and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks, 
That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wished. To die — to sleep — 
To sleep? Perchance to dream! ay, there's the rub: 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shufl3ed off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause : there's the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, 
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay. 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover'd country from whose bourne 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will, 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of ? 
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 



The Secret of Hamlet. 55 

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment, 
With this regard, their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now ! 
The fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons 
Be all my sins remember'd." 

Ophelia. Good, my lord. 
How does your honor for this many a day? 

Hamlet. I humbly thank you; well, well, well. 

Ophelia. My lord, I have remembrances of yours 
That I have longed to redeliver; 
I pray you now receive them. 

Hamlet. No, not I ; 
I never gave you aught. [tlid ; 

Ophelia. My honour'd lord, I know right well you 
And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd 
As made the things more rich : their perfume lost. 
Take these again ; for to the noble mind 
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 
There, my lord. 

Hamlet. Ha, ha! are you honest.? 

Ophelia. My lord.? 

Hamlet. Are you fair.? 

Ophelia. What means your lordship? 

Hamlet. That if you be honest and fair, your hon- 
esty should admit no discourse to your beauty. 

Ophelia. Could beauty, my lord, have better com- 
merce than with honesty? 

Hamlet. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will 
sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd 
than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his 
likeness: this was sometimes a paradox, but now the 
time gives it proof. I did love you once. 

Ophelia. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. 

Hamlet. You should not have believed me ; for vir- 
tue can not so innoculate our old stock but we shall 
relish of it : I loved you not. 

Ophelia. I was the more deceived." 



56 The Secret of Hamlet. 

Hamlet believes that Ophelia has been contami- 
nated by the arts of Claudius, and that she is even 
now his willing agent ; and so in the subsequent 
conversation with her, he warns her to fly from the 
contaminations of this world — not by suicide, but 
to a nunnery. 

" Go thy way to a nunnery. Where's your father? 
Ophelia. At home, my lord." 

Hamlet does not believe that Polonius is at home ; 
he has a suspicion that the King and his lord cham- 
berlain are in hearing, and so he takes leave of 
Ophelia in words intended for the ears of the King : 

" I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are 
married already, all but one, shall live ; the rest shall 
keep as they are. To a nunnery go ! 

Ophelia. O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown ! 
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword; 
The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 
The observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down 
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, 
That suck'd the honey of his music vows, 
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, 
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; 
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth 
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me, 
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see ! " 

The King and Polonius come from their hiding 
place, with somewhat different views of Hamlet. 

** King. Love ! his affections do not that way tend; 
Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, 
Was not like madness." 

Polonius still thinks — 

" The origin and commencement of his grief 
Sprung from neglected love." 



The Secret of Hamlet, 57 

The King concludes to send Hamlet to England, 
and so informs Polonius, in the presence of Ophelia. 
Hamlet overhears the plan of the King. 

***** 

"Ophelia believes Hamlet crazed; she is re- 
pulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, when she 
had bestowed her young heart with all its hopes 
and wishes ; her father is slain by the hand of her 
lover, as it is supposed, in a paroxysm of insanity : 
she is entangled inextricably in a web of horror 
which she can not even comprehend, and the result 
seems inevitable." 

" Of her subsequent madness," continues Mrs. 
Jameson, " what can be said? What an affecting 
— what an astonishing picture of a mind utterly, 
hopelessly wrecked ! — past hope — past cure ! There 
is the frenzy of excited passion — there is the mad- 
ness caused by intense and continued thought — 
there is the delirium of fevered nerves ; but 
Ophelia's madness is distinct from these; it is not 
the suspension, but the utter destruction of the 
reasoning powers ; it is the total imbecility, which, 
as medical people well know, frequently follows 
some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is 
frantic ; Lear is mad ; Ophelia is hisane. Her 
sweet mind lies in fragments before us — a pitiful 
spectacle ! Her wild, rambling fancies ; her aim- 
less, broken speeches ; her quick transitions from 
gayety to sadness, each equally purposeless and 
causeless ; her snatches of old ballads, such as per- 
haps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her 
infancy — are all so true to the life that we forget to 



58 The Secret of Hamlet, 

wonder, and can only weep. It belonged to 
Shakespeare alone so to temper such a picture that 
we can endure to dwell upon it : " 

" Thoughts and afflictions, passion, hell itself. 
She turns to favour and to prettiness." 

***** 
The reality of the supernatural is posited and 
expressed in the form of the appearance of the 
Ghost. The spirit of Hamlet's father commands 
him. The supernatural command appears as the 
law of duty to the son. His nature struggles with 
the imposed command from the other world. The 
struggle is an inner struggle ; betwixt love and law. 
Hamlet loves Ophelia ; and there are other difficul- 
ties in the way that cause him to hesitate. He is 
not at first sure that the Ghost is his father's; it 
may be the devil : 

** The spirit that I have seen 
May be the devil ; and the devil hath power 
To assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and perhaps 
Out of my weakness and my melancholy. 
As he is very potent with such spirits. 
Abuses me to damn me." 

But, admitting the reality of the Ghost and its 
commands, his nature shrinks from taking life, 
much less human life. His conscience makes a 
coward of him. At times he thinks he is the 
heaven appointed avenger ; then he doubts, post- 
pones, waits for circumstances to decide, or at 
least, put him in a position that he must decide. 

Every human life, real or ideal, results from 
three factors : first, a nature originally determined 



The Secret of Hamlet. 59 

to the individual ; secondly, something freely 
chosen ; and thirdly, something which comes from 
circumstances. And Shakespeare in Hamlet, 
desiring to represent in the character the inner 
struggles of Humanity, the apotheosis of the 
human conflict in life, as well as life itself, must 
present it in the form of a person. He gives 
Hamlet a nature ' originally determined ; ' places 
him in such circumstances that he is called upon to 
act, and freely choose a certain course of action. 

The problems to be solved in the study of human 
life and character are three : " Given the character 
of a man and the conditions of life around him, 
what will be his career? Or, given his character 
and career, of what kind were his surroundings? 
Character, career, circumstances; the relation of 
these three factors to each other is severely logical. 
From them is deduced all genuine history. Char- 
acter is the chief element ; for it is both a result of 
influences and a cause of results. 

" In Hamlet, the career and circumstances are 
plainly given ; but the character of the Prince has 
only been dimly conceived by interpreters of the 
Play. Phases and moods have been unduly empha- 
sized, and a part magnified into the whole. The 
play reveals the cautious, hesitating element of life, 
that vacillates from Pessimism to Optimism ; that 
postpones action until the capacity for action is 
weakened, and the power of faith itself atrophied. 

" Hamlet is a player, an actor ; life is his stage and 
he plays many parts, illustrating moods and the 
changes in his character — for the character cf 



6o The Secret of Hamlet. 

Hamlet is changing and being moulded during the 
progress of the play. He only appears insane ; 
a ' method in his madness ' is surely recognized, 
but as a player he is perfect : the actions of an 
insane person and the characterization of insanity 
upon the stage would to the beholder appear the 
same. 

*' Hamlet manifests a variety of mental states; 
he is Shakespeare's mouth, speech — modulated in 
the mental agitation of the hero, in the exhibition 
of typical mental and moral struggles. He is not 
a person, but humanity personated; the mental and 
moral struggles, the vehicles of the thought — 
Shakespeare's view and philosophy of life. It is 
the conflict between the human will and passions ; 
the spiritual struggle of every life. 

" Jealousy controls Othello ; ambition, Macbeth ; 
love, Romeo — in each case the will is overpowered 
by the passion : in Hamlet, every passion opposes 
the will ; but the will is reinforced by the imposed 
will of the supernatural world, uttered in the form 
and voice of his father's spirit, and the resultant 
action is held within the sphere of the conflicting 
powers. The lesson is of great importance — that 
revelation and command from the spirit world that 
is opposed by the inner revelation of the human 
spirit, in its highest faculties, should not be obeyed. 

" Life here is not to be explained, for in Hamlet 
* the way of life ' is not revealed. The other 
world, or rather the time and condition for the 
solution of life, is not here. The Gospels are the 
sequel to Hamlet ; or rather Hamlet is Shakespeare's 



The Secret of Hamlet. 6i 

plea for the necessity of the Gospel of Revelation, 
that solves the mysteries of Life, by the revelation 
and life of Him who was obedient to the Will of 
the Father, tempted in all points like as we are, yet 
without sin, without ' contriving aught ' against 
any one, or ' tainting his mind.' 

The Spirit that man should hear and obey is 
the Spirit of the Father of Humanity, speaking in 
the form of the Man Christ Jesus, ' This is my 
beloved Son, hear Him.' Paul was Hamlet a lo 
time ; but he was delivered from his ' body ^f 
death ' and was victorious through faith in Chri 
Hamlet is the concrete representation of life's 
struggles, unaided by the Christianity of Christ. 
Shakespeare experienced, observed, and realized 
the struggle of life without Christ. The play of 
Hamlet is a despairing cry for the revelation of and 
necessity for the Christ-life. It is the confession 
of the failure of philosophy in dealing with the 
mystery of life. Man is a composite of passions, 
faculties, and will. He is called upon to assert 
inner dominion, to rule himself, by the imposed 
command of the supernatural. What a tragedy is 
life, when spent in contemplation! And what a 
heavy burden life becomes when a profound sorrow 
has robbed it of all charm ! 

And the life of suppression — what a tragedy : 
and what will be the character of the suppressed 
life, when it at last expresses itself.'* 




MOTTO. 

Man is the State, the Church is God in Man. 

The end of Government is to unfold 

The social into harmony, and give 

Complete expression to the laboring thought 

Of universal genius ; first to feed 

The bodj, then the mind, and then the heart. 

The Church is God's eternal life in man, 

Which human creeds but limit and restrain. 

Its rites, its customs, and its usages 

Are inward breathings of inspiring truth, 

In the Cathedral silences of the mind 

And presence chambers, deep within the breast, 

Where the Eternal Splendor bodies forth 

His thought in workings of unbounded love. 

Oh ! man alone is holy; God within 

Man dwelleth as he doth not in the world ; 

And God through man, re-harmonized and made 

The type and image of the Infinite, 

Shall yet reveal Himself as ne'er before. 

The renovation of the race through love, 

The renovation of the world through love. 

The renovation of the State through love, 

Is the great purpose of the Father-Soul ! 

For this, all laws together move in one; 

For this, all streams of thought converge in one ; 

For this, the Seraphim in glory wait, 

As once to greet Messiah, manger-born. 

— Thomas L. Harris. 



(62) 



VI. 

HAMLET AND HORATIO. 

In *' Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" we have the 
profound personal thought of Shakespeare. The 
great Interpreter of Human Nature often goes 
deeper than the artist, revealing a personal convic- 
tion and experience. His words justify the in- 
scription under the bust in the old church at Strat- 
ford : 

*' In wisdom, a Nestor; in genius, a Socrates; in art, a 
Virgil." 

" In the plays of this great writer," says Munger, 
*' there is revealed no sense of Christianity either 
as a cause to be championed or as a prime factor in 
human life. Still they are Christian because they 
are so thoroughly on the side of humanity. If the 
predominant motive of Shakespeare was sought in 
his own lines, it would be the couplet in Henry V. : 

** ' There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
Would men observingly distil it out; ' 

a sentiment one with the Christian estimate of 
this world and indicative of its process." 

F. W. Robertson took the same view as revealed 
in the couplet, or rather the words, ' soul of good- 
ness in things evil,' and made it the sixth principle 
on which he taught ; and ' observingly distilled it 
out,' in his life and writings. 

(63) 



64 The Secret of Ha^nlet. 

Shakespeare resembles Henry V., more than any 
of the characters of his plays. These two men 
grew better as they grew older. Everywhere 
Shakespeare is on the side of virtue and truth ; and 
however he may have strayed in the early portion 
of his life in London, he was not only an upright 
and noble man for the main part, but a repentant 
man and a man whose life was influenced by the 
truth of Christianity. "His depth of capacity for 
loving lay at the root of all his knowledge of men 
and women, and all his dramatic pre-eminence. 
The heart is more intelligent than the intellect." 

'* He that hath love and judgment, too, 
Sees more than any others do." 

Tennyson recognizing this secret of Shakespeare's 
knowledge of men and women, sings — "In Me- 
moriam " — addressing the spirit of his vanished 
friend : 

" Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore, 

Where thy first form was made a man : 

I loved thee, spirit, and love; nor can 

The soul of Shakespeare love thee more." 

Love understands. It looks forth upon human 
strife, and reads the spirit beneath the form : 

" Who taught you this? 
I learn'd it out of women's faces." 

"The bond," says Plato, "which unites the 
human to the divine is Love, and Love is the long- 
ing of the Soul for Beauty ; the inextinguishable 
desire which like feels for like, which the divinity 



The Secret of Hamlet, 65 

within us feels for the divinity revealed to us in 
Beauty. Beauty is Truth." 

Shakespeare believed, long before Elizabeth 
Doten wrote, that : 

" By a power of thought unknown, 
Love shall ever seek its own. 
Sundered not by time or space, 
With no distant dwelling-place, 
Soul shall answer unto soul. 
As the needle to the pole. 
Leaving grief's lament unsaid, 
' Gone is gone, and dead is dead.' " 

And read in the face of Nature the Reconciling 
Spirit : 

** God of the Granite and the Rose! 

Soul of the Sparrow and the Bee ! 
The mighty tide of Being flows 

Through countless channels. Lord, from Thee. 
It leaps to life in grass and flowers. 

Through every grade of being runs. 
Till from Creation's radiant towers 

Its glory flames in stars and suns." 

Shakespeare saw, moreover, that the well-being 
of a man can not be secured except he partakes of 
the ills of life, ' the penalty of Adam.' In "As 
You Like It," the banished Duke tells his courtiers 
that their exile is a part of their moral training ; 

" Are not these woods 
More free from peril than the envious court? 
Here we feel not the penalty of Adam — 
The season's difference, as the icy fang 
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind.? 
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, 

5 



66 The Secret of Hamlet. 

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say — 
This is no flattery; these are counsellors 
That feelingly persuade me what I am. 
Sweet are the uses of adversity.'''' 

This is the lesson so hard for the Hamlets of this 
world to learn ! It takes time to learn the ' uses of 
this world ; ' the use of all history, or the forces 
that produce all the changes in time — there is a 
philosophic reason for it also, according to 
Shakespeare, who tells us that : 

** Time's glory is to calm contending kings, 
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light. 
To stamp the seal of time in aged things. 
To wake the morn and sentinel the night, 
To -wrong the ivronger till he render right; 
To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, 
And smear with dust their glittering golden towers." 

The historical cycle continues till the potential 
harvest in the solving thought and deed is reaped : 
' To wrong the wronger till he render right.' This 
is the deep philosophy of time — its historical and 
personal cycles are measured, and men are at last 
undeceived, for Shakespeare tells us that 

•• The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
Make instruments to scourge us : 
The dark and vicious place where thee he got 
Cost him his eyes." 

And the dying villain recognizing the harvest 
time of his reaping, says : 

*' Thou hast spoken right; 'tis true: 

The wheel is come full circle; I am here." 



The Secret of Hamlet. 67 

Hamlet represents a great mind, brooding over 
the burden and mystery of life ; reason standing at 
the limits of knowledge ; genius touching with 
trembling hand the thin veil that separates it from 
insanity : a mind that moves along the wrong way 
and at last standing at a door of the spirit world 
unlawful to open, and there soliloquizing — the 
unconscious self speaking and translating its fears 
in the strange words : 

" To be, or not to be; that is the question: 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles. 
And, by opposing, end them?" 

These lines reveal the secret of Hamlet's troubles. 
To him in his misfortune, ' To be, or not to be,' 
was the question, perpetually making its unwel- 
come inquiry, at irregular intervals. The death of 
his father and the hasty marriage of his mother, 
together with the attending circumstances, caused 
Hamlet to explore deeper than ever the abstract 
world of contemplation, where he dwelt, perhaps 
too long, even before his prospects were darkened 
by the death of the elder Hamlet. Contemplation 
must be balanced by activity. 

The son of a King pursuing his metaphysical 
studies at college, courted, sought, and envied ; 
happy, as well as one of his temperament and 
standing could be ; loving innocence, purity, 
and beauty, as embodied in the person and life of 
Ophelia — his life is changed with the change of 



68 The Secret of Hamlet. 

circumstances. The King's orphan feels unlike 
the King's son. 

The mystery of Hamlet lies in the mystery of 
the subject he endeavors to understand. He is 
preoccupied with himself ; he does nothing for any 
one ; lives for himself, and therefore fails to see the 
* uses of this world,' and reaps the negative result 
of his pessimism and inactive life. 

* * * * * 

Are the chief characters in the play incarnations 
of faculties of Man? Subjective feelings and 
sentiments translated and embodied in objective 
personalities? This view with caution may throw 
light upon the subject. 

In Hamlet, Shakespeare has revealed the charac- 
ter of the Prince, as well as he understood it. 
Hamlet's mind is startled at the pre-natal move- 
ments of its psychical powers. The prophetic 
faculty — the inner sight — that at best sees ' through 
a glass darkly,' and yet at times is conscious of the 
spirit world, and still demands corroborating con- 
firmations of the senses, as convincing proof of the 
correctness of its vision, is developed by contem- 
plation, disappointment, and bereavement. And 
Hamlet is the incarnation of this faculty in the 
soul, at a stage of its development when it pre- 
dominates the other faculties, after a crisis and 
struggle with them. He was a favored child of 
nature, so far as endowments were concerned, a 
'prince among the privileged,' highly cultured, 
and secretly exercising and endeavoring to prepare 
himself for a surer understanding of the mystery 



The Secret of Hamlet. 69 

of life, by following the hints of old writers, 
whose writings were inaccessible to the masses. 
*'I am not inclined to doubt," says Max Muller, 
*' the testimony of trustworthy witnesses, that by 
fasting and by even more painful chastening of the 
body, the mind may be raised to more intense 
activity. Nor can I resist the evidence that by 
certain exercises, such as peculiar modes of regula- 
ting the breathing, keeping the body in certain 
postures, and fixing the sight on certain objects, a 
violent exaltation of our nervous system may be 
produced which quickens our imagination and 
enables us to see and conceive objects which are 
beyond the reach of ordinary mortals." This was 
Hamlet's passion ; he sought happiness in the 
pursuit of occult knowledge and mysteries. 

The close relation of the mind to breathing is a 
part of the experience of every thoughtful student. 
In reading, whenever a brilliant idea is presented, 
breathing involuntarily ceases, in a perceptible 
degree. 

Horatio, the fellow-student and friend of Hamlet 
— himself the incarnation of a subjective faculty, 
perplexed sympathetically by grief — represents 
judgment and caution, influenced by tradition and 
education. Polonius represents the will growing 
weaker, as the man contemplates and hesitates in 
action, and is slain by passion in the absence of 
judgment. Hamlet — affection in bereavement, in 
one of his moods — sees the object of love, and 
conversing with Horatio — judgment— exclaims : 



7o The Secret of Hamlet. 

'* My father! methinks I see my father. 
Horatio. O where, my lord? 
Hamlet. In my mind's eye, Horatio. 
Horatio. I saw him once ; he was a goodly king. 
Hamlet. He was a man, take him for all in all, 
I shall not look upon his like again." 

The true estimate of a true son of a true father. 
Hamlet realized that the flesh is a veil that hinders 
perception of things beyond : 

'* O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, 
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! " 

expresses a desire of his that grows in intensity. 
If that can not be, he would know for himself, by 
escaping from the veil of flesh, but he is deterred 
by the conviction that the ' Everlasting had fix'd 
His canon against self -slaughter.* The uses of 
the world seem ' weary, stale, and uprofitable.' 

The prophetic faculty, latent in every soul, was 
also developed in Hamlet. He could read character 
and thought, as revealed in looks, tones, words, and 
acts of others. His soul was sensitive to the unseen 
world. He knew that there were ' More things in 
heaven and earth than philosophy dreamed.' He 
felt the presence of his departed father ; and the 
guilt of the guilty king, and the inner fears of his 
mother, subtly announced themselves in a confused 
way to his sub-consciousness, and from thence rising 
into consciousness in form of suspicion and fear, 
for: 

" Mind may act upon mind, though bodies be far divided ; 
For life is in the blood, but souls communicate unseen; 
For the soul hath its feelers, 



The Secret of Hamlet. 71 

Cobwebs floating on the wind, 

That catch events in their approach with sure and apt 
presentiment." 

The possibility of soul-sight while in the body is 
suggested, when Hamlet is represented as seeing 
his father's spirit. Hearing from the Ghost the 
truth in the matter of his death, his suspicions are 
confirmed and translated, causing him to exclaim : 
" O my prophetic soul!" He recognizes the form 
and features of his father, but is skeptical : 

** The spirit that I have seen may be the devil ; " 

and to satisfy himself on this point, he says : 

** I'll have grounds 
More relative than this; the play's the thing 
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." 

He determined to notice the effect produced upon 
the King when witnessing the dramatic show of the 
death of his father as revealed to him by the Ghost. 
As a result of this trial he catches ' the conscience 
of the King,' who leaves the players abruptly, and 
plans for sending Hamlet to England, with murder- 
ous designs upon the life of the Prince. 

Hamlet and Horatio are true friends. 

** Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man 
As e'er my conversation cop'd withal." 
' Horatio. O, my dear lord — 
Hamlet. Nay, do not think I flatter, 
For what advancement may I hope from thee, 
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits, 
To feed and clothe thee?" 



y2 The Secret of Hamlet. 

'* Dost thou hear? 
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, 
And could of men distinguish, her election 
Hath seal'd thee for herself: for thou hast been 
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; 
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards 
Hath ta'en with equal thanks : and blest are those 
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled 
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man 
That is not ^assion^s slave^ and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. 
As / do thee.'''' 

Horatio is Hamlet's ideal of man. His name, 
like that of Hamlet, begins with the letter ' H.' 
Shakespeare has intimated his character and temper- 
ament in the name given him and whose character- 
istics Hamlet has just described. 

* Oratio,' the word for discourse or flow of speech, 
breath — life — esoterically signifies in the name 
Horatio, a man whose life flows on smoothly towards 
the great ocean of life — eternity. He is not ' pas- 
sion's slave,' but free, of cool judgment, and while 
all the characters of the play — chief characters — 
die by accident, or as a result of circumstances, each 
reaping that which each has sown, ' the wheel 
comes full circle,' and all but Horatio pass off the 
stage of action and go behind the scenes of this 
world, and the curtain of nature falls upon the King 
and Queen, Laertes and Hamlet. 

Hamlet, Horatio, Ophelia — all have the ' H ' in 
their names — purposely signifying that there is an 
affinity between them — elements of life and charac- 
ter that accounts for the love and friendship of the 



The Secret of Hamlet, 73 

three. None of the other characters of the play 
have this letter ' H ' in their names. 

^ ^fC *^ 5jC ?JC 

Hamlet dying, says to Horatio : 

** Horatio, I am dead; 

Thou livest ; report me and mj cause aright 

To the unsatisfied. 

Horatio. Never believe it; 
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane : 
Here's yet some liquor left. 

Hamlet. As thou'rt a man, 
Give me the cup: let go; bj heaven, I'll have 't. 
O God ! — Horatio, what a wounded name, 
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind nie ! 
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 
Absent thee from felicity awhile. 
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
To tell my story." 

Hamlet gives Fortinbras his ' dying voice ' in 
the coming election, recognizing that Denmark 
will elect a king ; bids Horatio tell him so ; ' the 
rest is silence,' and Hamlet is dead! 

'■''Horatio. Now cracks a noble heart. 
Good-night, sweet prince. 
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! " 

Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, the English Am- 
bassador, and others appear upon the scene of 
death. The Ambassador says : 

** The sight is dismal ; 
And our affairs from England come too late : 
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing. 
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd, 
That Rosencrants and Guildenstern are dead. 
Where should we have our thanks .? 



74 T^'^(^ Secret of Hamlet. 

Horatio. Not from his mouth, 

Had it the ability of life to thank you : 
He never gave commandment for their death. 
But since, so jump upon this bloody question, 
You from the Polack wars, and you from England, 
Are here arriv'd, give orders that these bodies 
High on a stage be placed to the view : 
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world 
How these things came about : so shall you hear 
Of carnal^ bloody^ and umtatziral acts, 
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause, 
And in the upshot, purposes mistook 
Fallen on the inventors' heads. 

Fortinhras. Let four captains 

Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; 
For he was likely, had he heen J>ut on, 
To h.2ive proved most royally ; and for his passage 
The soldier's music and the rites of war 
Speak loudly for him." 

Martin Cooke thinks that Shakespeare hints, 
through this speech of Fortinbras, that Hamlet was 
a "Player, acting the part that typifies Humanity, 
in a play that sets forth Man's spiritual life in 
Worldly condition under the pressure of the law of 
the Supernatural." "Here, then," he continues, 
" is an actor within an actor ; a play within a play ; 
and a drama of the inner man." 

The play closes with the ' dead march :' and so 
in this life, we move with the funeral dirge to the 
grave, with mystery, agony, and fear, longing to 
learn the truth this side the grave — that can only 
be known beyond — for fjzind can not wholly antici- 
pate experience, especially a wholly new experience. 



MOTTO. 

Biron. What is the end of study? let me know. 

King. Why, that to know which else we should not know. 

Biron. Things hid and barr'd, you mean from common 
sense ? 

King. Ay, that is study's god-like recompense. 

Biron. Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain, 
Which with pain purchased, doth inherit pain : 
As, painfully to pore upon a book, 
To seek the light of truth; while truth the while 
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look: 
Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; 
So, ere you find when light in darkness lies, 
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes. 

— Shakespeare, "Love's Labor Lost." 



(75) 



VII. 
THE SECRET OF HAMLET. 

We have seen that the mystery of Hamlet is the 
incarnation of Shakespeare's larger vision turned 
upon the burden and mystery of life. A deeper 
insight into the deeper evils of the world, arising 
from the darker passions, such as treachery and 
revenge, greeted the symmetrical growth of the 
vision of evil, a fuller perception of the deeper 
springs of goodness in human nature, of the great 
virtues of invincible fidelity and unwearied love. 

.In Hamlet the central problem is a profoundly 
moral one. It is the supreme internal conflict of 
good and evil amongst the central forces and higher 
elements of human nature, as appealed to and de- 
veloped by sudden and powerful temptations, smit- 
ten by accumulated wrongs, or plunged in over- 
whelming calamities. As the result, we learn that 
there is something infinitely more precious in life 
than social ease or worldly success — nobleness of 
soul, fidelity to truth and honor, human love and 
loyalty, strength and tenderness, and trust to the 
very end. In the most tragic experiences this fidelity 
to all that is best in life is only possible through the 
loss of life itself. 

With the explanation above, and the key pro- 
posed to unlock the mystery of Hamlet, let us pro- 

(76) 



The Secret of Hamlet. 77 

ceed to the task of trying the key to the different 
departments and moods of the hero, as they present 
themselves in the progress of the play. 

The opening scene of the play furnishes the key- 
note of the tragedy. Francisco, the soldier-sentry, 
being relieved of his midnight watch, expresses his 
thanks, and continues : 

«« 'Tis bitter cold, 
And I am sick at heart." 

The freezing of Hamlet's nature, and the darker 
night of his life-watch is given in this secret chorus 
of the departing sentinel. The platform before the 
Castle at Elsinore is guarded by sentinels. Den- 
mark is threatened ; danger without and fears within. 
A Ghost crosses the platform, like the great fear 
that flits across the bosom of Hamlet the Dane. 
Marcellus and Bernardo, the officers, have seen it, 
and presented their vision to judgment — Horatio, 
who does not ' let belief take hold of him,' attrib- 
uting the vision, 'twice seen' by the officers, to 
their ' fantasy.' But the 'Ghost' confronts judg- 
ment, producing ' fear and wonder,' but not con- 
viction, in Horatio. He is a ' scholar ' — educated 
judgment — and is considered competent to interro- 
gate the apparition. The judgment is a close 
friend, to be relied upon as Horatio could be relied 
upon by Hamlet. Horatio challenges the Ghost ; 
it seems 'offended,' moves out of sight, and the 
challenger ' trembles and looks pale,' knowing that 
it ' bodes some strange eruption to the state.' While 
judgment is perplexed, it prepares itself for further 
vision by tradition, that says : 



78 The Secret of Hamlet. 

••In the most high and palmy state of Rome, 
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, 
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead 
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets." 

The Ghost, appearing again, interrupts the voice 
of tradition, but immediately makes its exit, at the 
crowing of ' the cock, that is the trumpet of the 
morn.' The scene closes with the belief on the 
part of Horatio that the 'spirit, dumb' to them, 
will speak to Hamlet, and he is to be acquainted 
with the vision. The sense and judgment receive 
no spirit messages ; these faculties are not in cor- 
respondence with the realm of spirits, and the 
Ghost has no message for Marcellus, Bernardo, or 
Horatio. 

In the second scene, in a room of state in the 
Castle, the King and Queen attempt to comfort 
Hamlet, unconscious of the fact that, by the mys- 
terious means of telepathy, they have revealed to 
the sub-liminal self of Hamlet their fears and 
guilty knowledge of facts they think hidden for- 
ever. The message, unconsciously and involun- 
tarily given, announces itself in a semi-confused 
manner at the terminus of the line, and Hamlet 
can not at this time read it accurately. 

***** 

Left alone, he soliloquizes on his troubles, when 
he is accosted by Horatio, who with Marcellus and 
Bernardo come to tell him of the appearance of the 
Ghost. "Coming events cast their shadows be- 
fore," and these friends have not yet performed 
their ' duty,' until the invisible telepathic wire pre- 



The Secret of Hamlet. 79 

sents the information concretely to the mental vision 
of Hamlet, who exclaims : 

" M7 father ! methinks I see my father ! " 
Horatio tells him of the apparition. Hamlet 
thinks it 'strange,' and is 'troubled;' but after 
enjoining secrecy about the Ghost, and promising 
to meet them on the platform ' 'twixt eleven and 
twelve,' his friends leave him, and the scene closes 
with Hamlet's words : 

" My father's spirit in arms ! All is not well ; 
I doubt some foul play; would the night were come ! 
Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise, 
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes." 
******* 

At the appointed time, Hamlet, Horatio, and 
Marcellus are upon the platform, awaiting the 
appearance of the Ghost. It appears, and Hamlet 

speaks : 

" What may this mean, 
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon. 
Making night hideous ; and we fools of nature 
So horridly to shake our disposition 
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? 
Say, why is this.? wherefore? what should we do?" 

The Ghost beckons Hamlet. Horatio — judgment 
— fears for the Prince, and forbids his following 
the apparition : 

"Do not, my lord. 
Hamlet. Why, what should be the fear? 

I do not set my life at a pin's fee ; 
^ And for my soiil^ what can it do to that, 
Being a thing immortal as itself? 
It waves me forth again; I'll follow it." 



8o The Secret of Hai7ilet. 

Judgment — Horatio — still protests, but Hamlet 
feels that ' fate ' calls him and follows the Ghost. 

^^Horatio. He waxes desperate with imagination. 
Marcellus. Let's follow; 'tis not fit thus to obey him. 
Horatio. Have after. — To what issue will this come.? 
Marcellus. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. 
Horatio. Heaven will direct it. 

Marcellus. Nay, let's follow him." 

***** 

The revelation of the Ghost to Hamlet in the 
fifth scene, but confirms his suspicions. He is 
determined to ' revenge ' his father's ' murderous 
death,' but the Ghost requests him to use restric- 
tive methods : 

** But, however thou pursuest this act, 

Taijit not thy mindy nor let thy soul contrive 
Against thy mother aught.''^ 

Hamlet realizes that — 

" The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right." 

He refuses to tell his friends what the Ghost 
revealed to him. He will not tell now, and when 
he does, only Horatio can he trust. They are 
sworn not to reveal what they have seen, and 
Horatio is reminded that — 

** There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

And both are warned not to notice him in the 
future, should he appear strange in his conversa- 
tion or conduct, and the first act of the play closes 
with Hamlet's words urging the hesitating friends, 



The Seci'ct of Hamlet, 8i 

Horatio and Marcellus, to go into the castle 
together : 

" Nay, come, let's go together." 

Hamlet is still with judgment and the senses — 
takes these with him from the platform : can he 
keep them under his control? 

* * * * » 

In Act n, Scene i, Ophelia tells Polonius of 
Hamlet's mysterious actions and somnambulistic 
pantomime in her presence. Evidently he had left 
his senses and judgment behind, and in a state 
of somnambulism enacted one of his dreams in 
person and in the presence of the subject of his 
dreams — Ophelia! The subjective dream tragedy 
of his psychic condition found objective realization 
in the love tragedy of Hamlet and Ophelia in her 
closet, although unremembered by the Prince when 
he descended to the plane of reason and the senses. 
Polonius and Ophelia both conclude that it is ' the 
very ecstasy of love.' 

There is a 'method in his madness,' and in 
Scene 2 the King speaks of ' Hamlet's transfor- 
mation,' having heard through Ophelia about his 
strange behavior. This in part was Hamlet's 
desire, notwithstanding the strange behavior was 
an expression of an inner subjective condition. 
Hamlet loved Ophelia, but the weakness of his 
mother influenced his love for womankind, and she 
no longer ' delights ' him. Besides Ophelia, in 
obedience to her father, had in a sense repulsed his 
love. He has pretended madness and lived in the 
6 



82 The Secret of Hamlet. 

psychic world above the plane of the senses so 
long that he passes from one state to the other 
almost unconsciously. 

***** 

Psychometry, clairvoyance, and clairaudience 
are perhaps only one faculty in various stages of 
development, and the phenomena of hypnotism 
and telepathy are combined in its fuller develop- 
ment. Hamlet was a psychometrest. This was 
his secret. He had developed the psychic side of 
the physical senses. The sense of touch, distrib- 
uted over the whole surface of the body through 
the nervous system, is the least developed of all the 
senses. This sense is more sensitive in some parts 
of the body than others. Its marvellous possibili- 
ties of development in the hands, are evidenced by 
expert silk buyers and money handlers. The silk 
buyer, merely by touch, instantly knows the weight 
and fineness of a dozen pieces of cloth hardly 
distinguishable to the eye. Girls in the mints 
detect under-weight or over-weight in the coin as 
it passes through their hands. "Post-mortem 
examinations of the bodies of the blind reveal the 
fact that in the nerves at the ends of the fingers, 
well defined cells of gray matter had formed, iden- 
tical in substance and in cell formation with the 
gray matter of the brain." 

The earth is surrounded by the atmosphere ; and 
so every individual is surrounded by an aura of its 
own. Hamlet could feel the character, when in 
the aura of the individual. In the philosophy 
of Horatio there were only two things, mind and 



The Secret of Hamlet, 83 

matter ; but in that of Hamlet, there were three. 
To him there was an inner atmosphere, the ether — 
an inner air — a soul medium — the medium of intui- 
tion. The intuition, like the intellect, may be 
developed by education, environment, and by 
exercise. Harmony between the elements of one's 
own nature, and harmony of the individual nature 
with the thought or person to be perceived psycho- 
logically, is essential for thought-transference and 
communion. Love creates and sustains this har- 
mony. Concentration and vibratory motion and 
practice is all that is essential in adding knowledge 
or strength to the faculty of intuition. A greater 
or less rapidity of vibration in the sound waves 
causes the different notes of music ; and in fact all 
consciousness on the physical and psychical planes 
comes to us in waves— vibrations of sound, light, 
heat, or cold. And these vibrations according to 
their rapidity produce the different notes of music ; 
the different colors and temperatures. The har- 
mony of line and dimension as these relate to each 
other, reveals to the sight the perfect form. The 
perfection of every living organism depends upon 
the harmony of its vibrations. The same law in 
regard to vibrations acts in causing health or disease, 
joy or sorrow, life or death. The harmony of pro- 
portion of nitrogen to oxygen results in pure air ; 
disturb the harmony by increasing the nitrogen or 
decreasing the oxygen, and the air is impure. In 
the last analysis of the human body, it is composed 
of oxygen and nitrogen. And the proportions of 
oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen in the body of an 



84 The Secret of Hamlet. 

individual at any one time, are not only an absolute 
indication of bodily health, but will indicate his 
spiritual condition also. 

"The character and development of the ego 
itself determines the composition of the body, and 
the proporti6ns of oxygen and nitrogen will be 
blended in exact relative proportions with the good 
and evil in the nature of man. Every good 
thought increases the proportion of oxygen, as a 
deep breath does, and lessens that of nitrogen, 
making the body finer and more beautiful. Every 
evil thought or impulse that is indulged increases 
the nitrogen, and has the reverse effect on body 
and soul. Hamlet lived in this ' fourth dimen- 
sion ' of space ; this was his secret, known by 
himself and Horatio only. 

* -X- * * * 

" He has ' bad dreams,' is ' dreadfully attended,' 
looks upon the world as a ' prison,' and concludes 
that there is ' nothing either good or bad, but- 
thinking makes it so ; ' and to him, thinking as he 
does, ' Denmark is a prison.' 

" The courtiers of the King, sent for in order to 
fathom the ' mystery of Hamlet,' appear. 'Com- 
ing events cast their shadows before,' and Hamlet 
feels their mission, telling them that ' there is a 
kind of confession in their looks;' 'I know the 
good King and Queen have sent for you.' 
4fr * * * * 

" Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were school- 
fellows of Hamlet, and should have been his friends. 
To them he is only the Hamlet they once knew — the 



The Secret of Hamlet. 85 

gentleman, the scholar. Hamlet is to them only- 
Hamlet's shadow." 

'•' Who is it that can tell me who I am? " asks 
King Lear ; and the fool answers " Lear's shadow." 

Hamlet sees through the purpose of his school- 
fellows : 

" Nay, then I have an eye of you." 

They are the King's spies, and are between him and 
the great purpose of his life. 

*' 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes 
Between the pass and fell incensed points 
Of mighty opposites." 

He suppresses his feelings, and with a tone of con- 
scious intellectual superiority, says : 

*' What a piece of work is man ! 
How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! 
In form and moving how express and admirable ! 
In action how like an angel ! 
In apprehension how like a god ! 
The beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! 
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" 
* •» * * * * * 

In the scene with the players, Hamlet is ' judi- 
cious, wise, and witty.' He is only 'mad north- 
northwest ' — only in one direction ; ' when the 
wind is southerly he knows a hawk from a hand- 
saw.' How to accomplish the mandate of the 
Ghost and to satisfy himself of the truth of the 
charge against Claudius, is uppermost in his mind. 
He suddenly conceives a method, inspired by the 
presence of the players : " Dost thou hear me, old 
friend; can you play the Murther of Gonzago?" 



86 The Secret of Ha^nlet, 

Assured that he can play the piece, Hamlet pro- 
poses to ' revenge ' and punish the King, and make 
the players tell all, ' for they are the abstract and 
brief chroniclers of the time.' He proposes to 
turn the play into a ' mouse-trap,' to ' catch the 
conscience of the King.' Alone, he soliloquizcG, 
expressing the silent meditations of his heart. He 
concludes, with a fixed purpose : 

" I'll have these players 
Play something like the murder of my father 
Before mine uncle : I'll observe his looks; 
I'll tent him to the quick; if he but blush, 
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen 
May be the devil ; and the devil hath power 
To assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and perhaps 
Out of my weakness and my melancholy, 
As he is very potent with such spirits, 
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds 
More relative than this; the play's the thing 
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." 



MOTTOES. 



Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
And then is heard no more : it is a tale 
Told hy an idiot, full of sound and furj. 
Signifying nothing. — Shakespeare, 



Lovers and women have such seething brains. 
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 
More than cool reason ever comprehends. 
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 
Are of imagination all compact. 

— Shakespeare. 



(87) 



VIII. 

THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY. 

About, my brain ! I have heard 
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, 
Have by the very cunning of the scene 
Been struck so to the soul that presently 
They have proclaimed their malefactions; 
For murther, though it have no tongue, will speak 
With most miraculous organ. — Hamlet. 

Hamlet has Horatio's confidence, and has con- 
fided to him — and to him only — the secret of the 
Ghost : 

*' There is a play to-night before the King; 
One scene of it comes near the circumstance 
Which I have told thee of my father's death." 

He takes great satisfaction in the ' one scene ' — 
the ' mouse-trap ' — with which he hopes to resolve 
all his doubts in reference to 

** Carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts," 

and in anticipation of the denouement^ his spirits 
are elevated. Fun and pathos are revealed in his 
wild speeches. He excuses the invitation of his 
mother to sit by her during the play, and lies down 
at the feet of Ophelia. The King and Queen and 
courtiers are waiting for the play to begin. The 
players are ready. Hamlet and Horatio are watch- 
ing the King. The dumb-show enters. 

(88) 



The Secret of Hamlet 89 

"A King and Queen come upon the improvised 
stage very lovingly ; the Queen embracing him, 
and he her. She kneels, and makes show of prot- 
estation unto him. He takes her up, and declines 
his head upon her neck ; lays him down upon a 
bank of flowers ; she seeing him asleep leaves him. 
Anon comes in a fellow, takes off his crown, 
kisses it, pours poison in the King's ears, and exit. 
The Queen returns, finds the King dead, and makes 
passionate action. The Poisoner, with some two 
or three Mutes, comes in again, seemingly to 
lament with her. The dead body is carried away. 
The Poisoner wooes the Queen with gifts ; she 
seems loath and unwilling a while, but in the end 
accepts his love." 

The dumb-show recalls the revelation of the 
Ghost to Hamlet : 

♦' 'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, 
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark 
Is by a forged process of my death 
Rankly abus'd; but know, thou noble youth, 
The serpent that did sting thy father's life 
Now wears his crown. 

Hamlet. O my prophetic soul ! 

My uncle ! 

Ghost. Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, 
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts — 
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power 
So to seduce ! — xvon to his shameful lust 
The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen." 

*' Sleeping within my orchard, 
My custom always in the afternoon. 
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, 
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, 



90 The Secret of Hamlet. 

And in the porches of my ears did pour 
The leprous distilment." 

** Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand 
Of life, of crown, of Queen, at once dispatched." 

The dumb-show reproduces the murder of the 
elder Hamlet by his brother Claudius, and his 
wooing of Gertrude : 

^* Ophelia. Belike this show imports the argument of 
the play? * 

[Enter Prologue.] 

Hamlet. We shall know by this fellow; the players can 
not keep counsel; they'll tell all. 

Prologue. For us, and for our tragedy, 

Here stooping to your clemency, *) 

We beg your hearing patiently. {Exit. 

Hamlet. Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring.? 
Ophelia. 'Tis brief, my lord. 
Hatnlet. As woman's love. 

{Enter txvo Players, King and ^ueen.] 
Player King. Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone 
Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed ground, [round 

And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen 
About the world have times twelve thirties been. 
Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands 
Unite commutal in most sacred bands." 

Hamlet, in these lines of the player king, is 
impersonating the elder Hamlet, and his reference 
to the fact that he and Gertrude had been married 
' full thirty ' years. Thirty times — once a year — 
had ' PhcEbus' cart gone round Neptune's salt wash 
and Tellus' orbed ground.' The sun had gone 
round the world thirty times, and the moon had 
with ' borrowed sheen ' accompanied him. And 



The Secret of Hamlet. 91 

80, in the lines of the player queen, Hamlet imper- 
sonates Gertrude : 

^^ Player ^ueen. So many journeys may the sun and moon 
Make us again count o'er e'er love be done ! 
But, nvoe is me^ you are so sick of late^ 
So far from cheer and from yonr former state, 
That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust, 
Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must: 
For women's fear and love holds quantity, 
In either aught, or in extremity. 
Now, what my love is, proof hath made you know. 
And as my love is sized, my fear is so : 
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear. 
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there, [too; 

Player King. Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly 
My operant powers their functions leave to do : 
And thou shalt live in this fair world behind, 
Honour'd, beloved; and haply one as kind 
For husband shalt thou 

Player ^ueen. O, confound the rest! 

Such love must needs be treason in my breast; 
In second husband let me be accurst ! 
None wed the second but who kill'd the first. 

Hamlet. {Aside.) Wormwood, wormwood ! 

Player ^ueen. The instances that second marriage move 
Are base respects of thrifty but none of love; 
A second time I kill my husband dead. 
When second husband kisses me in bed." 

This language of the Queen reminds one of the 
conversation of Horatio and Hamlet : 

" Horatio. My lord, I came to see your father's funeral. 

Hamlet. I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student ; 
I think it was to see my mother's wedding. 

Horatio. Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. 

Hamlet. Thrift, thrift, YioxdXioV 



g2 The Secret of Ha^nlct. 

This * play' within the ' play of Hamlet,- is an 
intimation that ' Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ' is 
an ' inner drama ' of the 'inner life.' The heart 
of Hamlet is always prominent ; his thoughts, 
purposes, and condition are the chief matters of 
concern. Hamlet, Ophelia, and Horatio are to- 
gether in the audience of the ' play ' within the 
play. Ophelia is entirely innocent of Hamlet's 
purpose in the play ; but he and Horatio are watch- 
ing the King. The King and Queen, Polonius, 
Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern are together. The 
audience itself, in its relative position, is a dumb- 
show of the realities of the play of Hamlet. 

Shakespeare tells us that the ' purpose of playing 
is to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature ; to 
show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, 
and the very age and body of the time, his form 
and pressure.' 

*' But in these cases, 
We still have judgment here; that we but teach 
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return 
To plague the inventor; this even-handed justice 
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice 
To our own lips." 

This ' scene ' is to Claudius a mirror of the past ; 
an ' abstract and brief chronicle ' of his past mur- 
derous acts. The deeds done pass before us in 
similitude — the very image of the past rises unex- 
pectedly before us ; we reap what we sow ! 

Human actions are immortalized by light ; 
thoughts by electricity; and words by ethereal 
vibrations. Man writes his own pictorial book of 



The Secret of Ha7tilet, 93 

life, and also writes an ' inner book of life ' within 
his book of life. He, in his consciousness, reads 
the ' inner book,' is startled when an external page 
of his personal autobiography passes before his 
gaze. 

♦* Player King. I do believe you think what now you speak. 

But what we do determine oft we break. 

Purpose is but the slave to memory, 

Of violent birth, but poor validity ; 

Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, 

But fall unshaken when they mellow be. 

Most necessary 't is that we forget 

To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt; 

What to ourselves in passion we propose. 

The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. 

The violence of either grief or joy 

Their own enactures with themselves destroy: 

Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament' 

Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident. 

This world is not aye, nor 't is not strange 

That even our loves should with our fortunes change, 

For 't is a question left us yet to prove, 

Whether love lead fortune or else fortune love. 

The great man down, you mark his favorite flies; 

The poor advanc'd makes friends of enemies. 

And hitherto doth love on fortune tend ; 

For who not needs shall never lack a friend, 

And who on want a hollow friend doth try 

Directly seasons him his enemy. 

But, orderly to end where I begun. 

Our wills and fates do so contrary run 

That our devices still are overthrown. 

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own : 

So think thou wilt no second husband wed. 

But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead. 

Player ^ueen. Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light ! 
Sport and repose lock from me day and night ! 



94 The Secret of Hamlet, 

To desperation turn my trust and hope ! 
An anchor's cheer in prison be my scope! 
Each opposite that blanks the face of joy 
Meet what I would have well and it destroy! 
Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, 
If once a widow, ever I be wife I 

Ha7nleL If she should break it now ! 

Player King. 'Tis deeply sworn ; 
Sweet, leave me here awhile : 
My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile 
The tedious day with sleep. {Sleeps.) 

Player ^ueen. Sleep rock thy brain; 

And never come mischance between us twain ! " 

The player queen leaves the stage ; Gertrude 
thinks ' The lady protests too much ; ' Claudius 
asks if there is not offense in the argument ; Ham- 
let says, ' No offence in the world.' 

*' [Enter Lticianus.] " 

Hamlet has told the King that he calls the play 
' the mouse-trap,' and as Lucianus enters he be- 
comes impatient for him to begin — ' Come : the 
croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.' 

" Lucianus. Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and 

time agreeing; 
Confederate season, else no creature seeing; 
Thou mixture rank of midnight weeds collected. 
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected. 
Thy natural magic and dire property, 
On wholesome life usurp immediately. 

{Pours the poison into the sleeper^ s ear.] 

Claudius rises, and cries : 

•' Give me some light! — away! " 
The mouse-trap has closed in upon him ; the con- 
science of the King rises within him, and the dark- 



The Secret of Hainlet. 95 

ness of his murderous act overwhelms him. All 
leave except Hamlet and Horatio ; and they are 
both now satisfied that the Ghost revealed the 
truth. King Claudius is in great anger, ' marvel- 
lous distempered ; ' Gertrude, ' in most great 
affliction of spirit,' in her closet, desires Hamlet 
not to retire until she can speak to him alone. His 
' behaviour has struck her into amazement and 
admiration.' The court is in great excitement. 
Polonius and the King have previously arranged 
that after the ' play ' Gertrude is to ' all alone 
entreat him to show his grief.' Polonius is to 
secrete himself in the room and hear the conference 
between Hamlet and ' his queen mother,' If this 
plot fails, Hamlet is to be sent to England, or 
confined, as the King thinks best. 

** If she find him not, 
To England send him, or confine him where 
Your wisdom best shall think." 

Hamlet expresses his contempt of the King 
openly to his creatures ; Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
stern quail before his sarcasm ; he desires to be 
alone ; dismisses all ; his mind is now made up ; he 
is ready to revenge : 

** 'Tis now the very witching time of night, 

When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out 

Contagion to this world ; now could I drink hot blood, 

And do such bitter business as the day 

Would quake to look on. Soft ! now to my mother. 

O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever 

The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom; 

Let me be cruel not unnatural. 



96 The Secret of Hajnlet. 

I will speak daggers to her, but use none ; 
M7 tongue and soul in this be hypocrites : 
How in my words soever she be shent, 
To give them seals never, my soul, consent! " 

Hamlet leaves the hall, and Polonius, who has 
been shadowing him, hastens to tell Claudius. 
The King and his courtiers, Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern, have hastily arranged to send Hamlet 
to England, and these two have just left the King, 
when Polonius tells him hurriedly : 

*' My lord, he's going to his mother's closet. 
Behind the arras I'll convey myself. 
To hear the process; I'll warrant she'll tax him home: 
And as jca said, and ivisely was it said, 
'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, 
Since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear 
The speech, of vantage. Fare you well, my liege; 
I'll call upon you ere you go to bed. 
And tell you what I know." 

Polonius hastens to the closet of the Queen to 
hear the interview between Hamlet and ' his queen 
mother.' Poor ' foolish prating knave ' — ' good 
old man ; ' unconsciously he has made his last 
' adieu ' to Claudius. And Ophelia — poor inno- 
cent Ophelia, whose destiny is linked in sorrow 
with the destiny of Hamlet — the last words while 
yet sane was her exclamation at the ' play,' ' The 
King rises ! ' These were her last words except 
the unrecorded conversation between her and her 
father, overheard, it may have been, by Horatio, 
and by him hastily conveyed to Hamlet. The 
conversation confirms what Hamlet already knew 
of his forced visit to England. 



The Secret of Hamlet. ^*j 

And Hamlet, detained by Horatio s message, 
saddened by Ophelia's sorrows, concludes to make 
an end of the author of all his trouble, and for this 
purpose enters his room, just as the conscience- 
stricken Claudius retires and kneels in prayer — still 
wanting ' light.' Hamlet refuses to kill the King 
at prayer ; his weakness overbalances for the time 
his purpose ; he postpones his revenge. The 
prayer of Claudius, like ' physic ' for the sick, only 
prolongs his ' sickly days.' 

** My mother stays — 
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days." 

Hamlet leaves the King and turns toward the 
closet of ' his queen mother.' In the scene with 
the Queen, Hamlet vindicates his own sanity : 

** It is not madness 
That I have uttered : bring me to the test, 
And I the matter will re-word ; which madness 
Would gambol from." 

This is Shakespeare's test of sanity. 

'• Mother, for love of grace, 
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, 
That not your trespass but my madness speaks." 

Here Hamlet reveals his secret, and we are called 
upon to ask ourselves what we would do under the 
circumstances. Put yourself in Hamlet's place! 

Polonius dies by an accident instead of his ' bet- 
ters.' The ' wretched, rash, intruding fool ' is sent 
into the presence — not of Claudius, but the elder 
Hamlet, his former King. And this by a ' sudden 
7 



98 772^ Secret of Hamlet. 

impulse, and not a determinate action of the will. ' 
He scarcely regrets the accident : 

" Take thy fortune ; 
Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger." 

This scene is a mouse-trap also — it catches the 
conscience of the Queen. Hamlet exhibits in 
dumb-show the image of the elder Hamlet, and 
Claudius — another ' play ' within the flay — which 
wrings her heart, while he upbraids her of her 
guilt. 

'* Have you eyes? 
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, 
And batten on this moor? " 

The guilty Queen cries out in despair : 

*' O Hamlet, speak no more: 
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, 
And there I see such black and grained spots 
As will not leave their tinct." 

His mind is eased by his colloquy with his 
mother. The Ghost appears to whet his ' almost 
blunted purpose,' but nothing is done. He weeps 
over Polonius : 

** For this same lord, 
I do repent; but Heaven hath pleas'd it so, 
To punish me with this and this with me^ 
That I must be their scourge and minister." 

Next he startles the Queen ; his intellect is again at 
its subtleties : 

" I must to England; you know that? 
^ueen. Alack, 

I had forgot; 't is so concluded on. 



The Secret of Hainlet, 99 

Hamlet. There's letters seal'd, and my two school- 
fellows — 
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd — 
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way; 
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work; 
For 't is the sport to have the engineer 
Hoist with his own petard; and 't shall go hard 
But I will delve one yard below their mines, 
And blow them at the moon." 

He casts himself like a feather upon the great 
wave of fate — he embraces the events that mar- 
shalled him ' to knavery.' He is confident of his 
cause ; courts the issue ; believes that he pierces 
through the darkness of his fate : 

** I see a cherub, that sees," 

is his reply to the King as to his purposes in send- 
ing him to England. The ' divinity that shapes 
his end ' will take care of him ; the ' cherub sees ' 
and will aid. He leaves for England ; not forget- 
ting him whose — 

" Form and cause conjoined ; preaching to stones, 
Would make them capable; " 

but still meditating instead of acting. 

*' O, from this time forth, 
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth ! " 

his sudden conclusion as he follows his guards 
toward the ship that sails for England. 



MOTTOES. 



I see a cherub that sees them. — Hamlet. 

Behold, thou art pilot of the ship, and owner of that 

freighted galleon, 
Competent, with all thy weakness, to steer into safety 

or be lost: 
Compass and chart are in thy hand : roadstead and 

rocks thou knowest; 
Thou art warned of reefs and shallows ; thou beholdest 

the harbour and its lights. 

— TUPPER. 



At St. Helena, in his last illness, one morning, Napo- 
leon started up and exclaimed, in dreary delirium: ** I 
have just seen my good Josephine, but she would not 
embrace me. She disappeared at the moment when I was 
about to take her in my arms. She was seated there. 
She is not changed. She is the same, full of devotion to 
me. She told me we were about to see each other again, 
never more to part. Did you see her ? " 

— Abbott's *' Napoleon Bonaparte," Vol. ii, ch. 34. 



(100) 



IX. 

HAMLET AND THE CHERUB. 

The voyage on the sea, with its change of air 
and active excitement had a beneficial effect upon 
Hamlet. In his letter to Horatio he says : 

*' Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very 
war-like appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves 
too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour; in the 
grapple I boarded them : on the instant they got clear of 
our ship; so I alone became their prisoner. They have 
dealt with me like thieves of mercy : but they knew what 
they did ; I am to do a good turn for them. Let the King 
have the letters I have sent; and repair thou to me with as 
much speed as thou wouldst fly death. I have words to 
speak in thine ear will make thee dumb ; yet are they much 
too light for the bore of the matter. These good fellows 
will bring thee where I am. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 
hold their course for England : of them I have much 
to tell thee. Farewell. 

** He that thou knowest thine, 

*' Hamlet." 

Hamlet's letter to the King, sent by the sailors, 
gives his explanation for his ' strange and sudden 
return.' 

* High and mighty: 
*' You shall know I am set naked on your kingdom. 
To-morrow shall I beg leave to see your kingly eyes ; when 
I shall, first asking your pardon thereunto, recount the 
occasion of my sudden and more strange return." 

(lOl) 



I02 The Secret of Hamlet. 

The King does not understand the letter. He 
wonders as to the reality or possible deception in 
the matter, helplessly asking advice from Laertes, 
who has in secret returned from France : 

** What should this mean? Are all the rest come back? 
Or is it some abuse, and no such thing? " 

The * Cherub ' of Hamlet reminds one of the 
' Demon ' of Socrates, that forewarned him of 
dangers. And by the reference, Shakespeare 
suggests that the oracles of antiquity were not all 
impostures. His theory of human nature is briefly 
outlined as follows : 

1. "Man is a duality, consisting of an organ- 
ized spiritual form, evolved coincidently with and 
permeating the physical body, and having corre- 
sponding organs and development." 

2. " Death is the separation of this duality, and 
effects no change in the spirit, morally or intellec- 
tually." 

3. " Progressive evolution of the intellectual and 
moral nature is the destiny of individuals ; the 
knowledge, attainments, and experience of earth 
life forming the basis of spirit life." 

4. "Spirits can communicate through properly 
endowed mediums. They are attracted to those 
they love or sympathize with, and strive to warn, 
protect, and influence them for good by mental 
impression, when they can not effect any more 
direct communication ; but, as follows from the 
fact that death effects no change in the spirit, 
morally or intellectually, their communication will 



The Secret of Hamlet, 103 

be fallible, and must be judged and tested just as 
we do those of our fellow men." 

5. ** In this life, Man is in every act and 
thought helping to build up a ' mental fabric ' 
which will be and will constitute himself more com- 
pletely after the death of the body than it does 
now. Just as this fabric is well or ill built, so 
will our progress and happiness be aided or re- 
tarded. Just in proportion as we have developed 
our higher intellectual and moral nature, or starved 
it by disuse and by giving undue prominence to 
those faculties which secure us mere physical or 
selfish enjoyment, shall we be well or ill fitted for 
the new life we enter on. Men are best educated 
by being left to suffer the natural consequences of 
their actions." 

'♦ I am thy father's spirit; 
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, 
And for the day confined to fret in fires, 
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
Are burnt and purged away." 

If the soul is not liberated in the ' days of 
nature,' it will still be ' hindered ' in its ' prison- 
house ' beyond the grave. 

" But that I am forbid 
To tell the secrets of my prison-house, 
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word 
Would harrow up thy soul." 

Horatio having received the letters from Hamlet, 
' the ambassador that was bound for England,' 
hastily ' finds means to the King,' through Claudia, 
who gives the letters to the King's messenger: 



I04 The Secret of Hamlet. 

" Come, I will make jou way for these letters ; 
And do 't the speedier, that you may direct me 
To him from whom you brought them." 

Horatio, in company with the sailors, eagerly 
obeys Hamlet's urgent command : ' Repair thou to 
me with as much speed as thou wouldst fly death.' 
The friend of the Prince finds him alone — unat- 
tended — as he had'written in his letter to the King. 
The two friends, after conversing, approach the 
churchyard, and are in hearing of the clowns, who 
are digging a grave for the ' fair Ophelia ' — Ham- 
let's 'rose of May,' his 'cherub that sees' the 
' purposes ' of the King. Hamlet thinks the 
clown has ' no feeling of his business ; ' if he did, 
he would not sing ' at grave-making.' He com- 
ments upon the ' skulls ' thrown up by the ' grave- 
digger ; ' speaks to the man digging the grave ; 
replies to his repartee, and asks : 

•* How long hast thou been a grave-maker? 

Cloivn. Of all the days i' the year, I came to 't that day 
that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras. 

Hamlet. How long is that since ? 

Cloivn. Can not you tell that? every fool can tell that: 
it was the very day that young Hamlet was born ; he that is 
mad, and sent into England. 

Hamlet. Ay, marry; why was he sent into England? 

Clown. Why, because he was mad; he shall recover his 
wits there; or, if he do not, it's no great matter there. 

Hamlet. Why? 

Cloivn. 'Twill not be seen in him there; there the men 
are as mad as he. 

Hamlet. How came he mad ? 

Cloivn. Very strangely, they say. 

Hamlet. How strangely? 

Cloivn. Faith, e'en with losing his wits." 



The Secret of Hamlet. 105 

Hamlet philosophizes on death as suggested by 
the skull of Yorick, whom he has known twenty- 
three years before. He passes from grave to gay, 
in his conversation with Horatio, about Alexander 
and Caesar, improvising poetry, until the King, 
Queen, priests, courtiers, and others of the funeral 
procession approach the now finished grave, with 
the body of Ophelia. After his surprise at hearing 
of the death of his lover, the scene at the grave, 
the struggle with Laertes, he is quieted by Horatio ; 
and in the large hall of the castle, Hamlet explains 
to Horatio his experience on the ship with the 
attendant circumstances : 

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, 
That would not let me sleep : methought I lay 
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly — 
(And praised be rashness for it; let us know, 
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, 
When our deep plots do pall ; and that should teach us 
There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will) 

Horatio. That is most certain. 

Hamlet. Up from my cabin, 

My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark 
Groped I to find out them ; had my desire ; 
Finger'd their packet; and, in fine, withdrew 
To mine own room again : making so bold, 
My fears forgetting manners, to unseal 
Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio — 
O royal knavery ! — an exact command, 
Larded with many several sorts of reasons. 
Importing Denmark's health and England's too, 
With, ho ! such bugs and goblins in my life, 
That, on the supervise, no leisure bated, 
No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, 
My head should be struck off. 



io6 The Secret of Hamlet. 

Horatio. Is 't possible? [leisure. 

Hamlet. Here's the commission; read it at more 
But wilt thou hear me how I did proceed? 

Horatio. I beseech you." 

***** 
Hamlet divined the King's purpose in sending 
him to England from the first. Hence, on ship- 
board, he has a vague apprehension of mischief. 
He can not sleep. He dreams that he is a prisoner 
in irons, springs from his bed, and v^^hile in a 
state of somnambulism gropes in the dark in 
search of his guards — Guildenstern and Rosen- 
crantz — finds their packet, withdraws to his own 
room again, unseals the packet, reads ' their grand 
commission,' in which he finds ' an exact com- 
mand ' for his decapitation on his arrival in Eng- 
land. Having his father's signet in his purse, he 
devises a new commission, with a command to the 
King of England to put the two courtiers to death ; 
subscribes the commission, seals it, and puts it 
where he found the packet. The sleeping courtiers 
knew not the change, and the next day the sea 
fight occurred, and ' in the grapple ' Hamlet 
boarded the pirate ship and became the prisoner 
of the pirates. The two ships separating, Guild- 
enstern and Rosencrantz sail to England and are 
executed according to Hamlet's commission, while 
the pirates, as a result of a bargain, set Hamlet on 
the soil of Denmark. 

Horatio regrets the fate of the two courtiers, but 
Hamlet's conscience feels no remorse : 

•* Thej are not near mj conscience; their defeat 
Does by their own insinuation grow." 



The Secret of Hamlet. 107 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did not distinctly 
know the purpose of their commission. If they 
had known it, they would have turned back, after 
the separation of Hamlet from them. Hamlet 
expected to go with them to England, until the 
pirate ship was boarded by him, and he was thus 
separated from them. The crisis in Hamlet's life 
had come ; he is forced to act ; the cherub warns ; 
he is ' pushed by unseen hands ; ' it is ' Heaven's 
ordinant.' Says Werder : 

" As surely as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 
deliver their letter, his head falls. That letter^ 
then, they must not be allowed to deliver; they 
7nust deliver a different one. But do you say he 
could have spared them? he could have written 
something that would endanger neither him nor 
them? Does he know or can he discover from 
them so that he may depend upon their word, how 
far they are cognizant of the purport of their 
errand? Whether they are not charged with some 
oral message? What if they should contradict 
what he might write of a harmless character? 
What if the King of England, being in doubt, 
should send back to Denmark for further directions, 
detain all three, and then, as surely was to be 
expected, put Hamlet to death? No, there is no 
expedient possible, no evasion, no choice between 
thus or otherwise. He must sacrifice them, and 
even without allowing them time to confess — mzist 
do this even. For, if only they are allowed time 
for confession, after they are seized and made sen- 
sible of their position, there is no foreseeing what 
turn things may take for him." 



io8 The Secret of Hamlet. 

And so Hamlet's after-observation embodies a 
great truth : 

** 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes 
Between the pass and fell-incensed points 
Of mighty opposites." 

Werder thus explains the diplomatic words of 
Hamlet: "Whoever, from his position, or from 
his zeal and officiousness, undertakes the office of 
carrying the letter and Hamlet to England, must 
suffer whatever of harm to himself may be con- 
nected with such an errand. The business is dan- 
gerous ; such affairs always are. The baseness of 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is their ruin : they 
promenade, so to speak, in the sphere of a fate 
which involves damnation without scenting or 
wishing to scent the sulphur. When such a king 
bears rule, his servants are always exposed to the 
very worst that can befall ; and at any moment 
their ruin may come through circumstances and 
causes, from which nothing may seem more remote 
than the catastrophe : for the main thing is over- 
looked, because it is always present, even the 
ground on which all concerned live and move, 
upon which all rests, and which is itself Destruc- 
tion. Whoever serves such a king, and without 
any misgiving of his crime, serves him with ready 
zeal ; upon him Hell has a claim ; and if that claim 
be made good, he has no right to complain. — These 
are things in which Shakespeare knows no jesting, 
because he is so great an expounder of the Law, 
the Divine Law ; and he holds to it as no second 
poet has done." 



The Secret of Hainlet. 109 

Horatio is surprised at the revelation of the 
King's purposes toward Hamlet, who nov/ feels it 
incumbent upon himself to mete out justice to the 
usurping Claudius. He now has the evidence, the 
written evidence of his murderous designs upon the 
Prince of Denmark : he can now meet both the 
King and the public with justifying proof of his 
guilt. 

The crisis is at hand, for the King will soon hear 
of the issue of the business in England — the death 
of his courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 
Hamlet is ready ; ' the interim ' will give him time 
for thought ; if not, the ' cherub ' will warn, and at 
any rate he is determined. He is sorry of the 
encounter with Laertes at the grave of Ophelia, 
and confesses that the ' grief ' of her brother put 
him ' into a towering passion.' 



MOTTO. 



Hamlet. O, I die, Horatio; 
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit: 
I can not live to hear the news from England ; 
But I do prophesy th' election lights 
On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice; 
So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less, 
Which have solicited \Dies.\ 

Horatio. The rest is silence : 

Now cracks a noble heart. — Goodnight, sweet Prince; 
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest ! 

— Shakespeare, " Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." 



(ito) 



X. 

DEATH OF HAMLET. 

Hamlet discriminates, as does Shakespeare him- 
self throughout his works, between fate and for- 
tune. Fate seems to him inevitable and invincible 
destiny ; fortune presides over the smaller variations 
of life. Fate is constant and continuous, while 
fortune is mobile and fluctuating. Hamlet respects 
and fears fate ; he manifests contempt for fortune : 

** This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange 

That even our lives should with our fortunes change." 

He starts with the theory that he is born to be 
his father's avenger, and to restore order and jus- 
tice in Denmark : 

** The time is out of joint: O cursed spite 
That ever I was born to set it right ! " 

His power of thought hinders him, and even the 
decrees of fate are questioned, brooded upon, and 
distrusted. He describes his mental conflict in his 
own lines : 

** Our wills and fates do so contrary run 
That our devices still are overthrown, 
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own." 

Sometimes he resolves to let the tragedy which 
he foresees solve itself as it will. Even Hercules 
could not alter the predestined course of events : 

(III) 



112 The Secret of Hamlet. 

•• Let Hercules himself do what he may, 

The cat will mew, the dog will have his day." 

Indiscretion is sometimes better than contrivance : 

** Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well 

When our deep plots do pall ; and that should teach us 
There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will." 

Horatio thinks he will lose the wager, but the 
Prince is confident of success : 

*' I shall win at the odds. 
But thou wouldst not think how ill all 's 
Here about my heart; but it is no matter." 

The villainous plot of Claudius and Laertes, the 
poisoned rapier, and the cup, and the coming 
events, are felt by the unsuspecting Prince ; but he 
refuses the offer of Horatio to postpone the trial of 
skill with Laertes : ' ' Not a whit ; we defy augury ; 
there is a special providence in the fall of a spar- 
row. If it be now, 'tis not to come ; if it be to 
come, it will not be now ; if it be not now, yet it 
will come : the readiness is all." 

Horatio, as the friend of the Prince, shares his 
prominent qualities. He possesses a lively imagi- 
nation, but under better control than that of his 
friend. He is in sympathy with what might be 
termed the Hamletic philosophy. His reply to 
Bernardo's question in the opening scene: 'Is 
Horatio there? ' reminds one of Hamlet's signature 
of his letter to Ophelia : ' Thine while this ma- 
chine is to him.' Horatio's ' a piece of him ' and 
Hamlet's ' machine ' are alike in the suggestion of 
dichotomy of personality. 



The Secret of Hainlet. 113 

The incidents of the combat and the final denoue- 
ment of the drama are quite in accord with Ham- 
let's character in the rest of the play. He remains 
to the last undecided as to his great purpose. His 
mother's death by drinking the poisoned goblet, 
Laertes' dying confession of his uncle's treachery 
— these are at last the impelling causes that induced 
him to stab his uncle. But it is clear they are 
purely accidental. . . As he himself designated 
it, the whole affair was but a ' chance ' — an event 
as devoid of any plan, plot, or prearrangement as 
any fatality could well be. The King and Queen 
reap together the harvest of death. Claudius dies 
by Hamlet's hand. The King forced his destiny. 
Hamlet's great purpose has been achieved. His 
*mind is not tainted,' neither has he 'contrived 
against his mother aught.' Claudius has unwit- 
tingly poisoned Gertrude, and in part caused the 
death of Laertes as well as himself. "No less 
than four murders lay at his door, yet Hamlet 
thinks that his assassination of the murderer may 
need a kindly construction." And so he exhorts 
his friend to set him right with the world : 

'* O, good Horatio, what a wounded name, 

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me," 

words which partially explain the vacillation and 
doubt of his past life. Hamlet's character — his 
desire to do right — accounts for his hesitation. He 
is a skeptic in action until the very last. "The 
consummation of the plot has been brought about 
by a series of accidents and entirely irrespective of 

8 



114 -^^^^ Secret of Hamlet. 

his design or volition, and he reflects on the issue 
with his accustomed vacillation and uncertainty." 

"Men must act often in critical conjuntions by 
the same iron law of necessity that compels them 
to live. Great actions or purposes, like great 
truths, are not always certainly based." Besides, 
some minds are naturally impatient of coercive 
action, just as others dislike prescribed beliefs. 
And as actions are fatal, if regarded as decisive 
events, men are pardonable, if they become cau- 
tious. Actions, like definitive beliefs, are pregnant 
with large results. 

The assassination of Claudius, before his guilt 
and villainy could be established, would have sub- 
jected Hamlet to the charge of treason and murder. 
To attempt to justify such an event to his mother 
or the Danish nation on the sole evidence of a sup- 
posed spectral appearance would have been absurd. 
There would have been no method or sense even, 
in such madness. "It would have been at once 
ascribed to his own ambition — an act of revenge on 
his uncle for anticipating his own ascension to the 
throne." Hamlet never could have assassinated 
Claudius, in the absence of proof that could be 
demonstrated to the world. He represents justice 
against crime, human right against arbitrary tyr- 
anny, truth against falsehood. 

The dying Laertes justifies Hamlet in the death 
of Claudius : 

" He is justly served; 
It is a poison temper'd by himself. — 
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet; 



The Secret of Hamlet. 115 

Mine and mj father's death come not upon thee, 
Nor thine on me. 

Hamlet. Heaven make thee free of it ! I follow thee. 
I'm dead, Horatio. — Wretched Queen, adieu ! — 
You that look pale and tremble at this chance. 
That are but mutes or audience to the act. 
Had I but time, as this fell-sergeant, Death, 
Is strict in his arrest — O, I could tell you. 
But let it be. — Horatio, I am dead ; 
Thou livest : report me and my cause aright 
To the unsatisfied. 

Horatio. Never believe it: 
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane : 
Here's yet some liquor left. 

Hamlet. As thou'rt a man. 

Give me the cup: let go; by Heaven, I'll have 't. 
O God, Horatio ! what a wounded name. 
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! 
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart. 
Absent thee from felicity awhile. 
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
To tell my story." 

Young Fortinbras arrives from Poland, and the 
ambassadors of England also appear upon the scene 
of death. Hamlet dies before he hears the news 
from England ; but gives his ' dying voice ' for 
Fortinbras as King of Denmark. 

The elder Hamlet killed the elder Fortinbras, of 
Norway, in battle, and made conquest of his lands. 
Young Hamlet gives young Fortinbras his ' dying 
voice,' all his rights as the successor of the crown 
of Denmark. 

"The Danish crown is partly elective, partly 
hereditary ; that is to say, elective within the circle 
of a particular family and kindred. Gertrude was 



Ii6 The Secret of Haiiilet. 

the child of the former King; and Hamlet's father 
was brought within the circle of eligibility by his 
marriage with her. The Queen, who because of 
her hereditary right, is described as ' the imperial 
jointress of this warlike State,' being now dead, 
and also her only heir, the Prince of Denmark, 
there is no one of the family to become successor 
to the Kingdom." 

Hamlet recognizes that young Fortinbras has 
' some rights ' in the Kingdom, gives his ' voice ' in 
his favor. And Horatio thinks the ' voice '-desire 
of Hamlet will influence the Danes to choose For- 
tinbras as King of Denmark. The Ambassador 
from England, referring to the bloody scene, says : 

" The sight is dismal; 
And our affairs from England come too late : 
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, 
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd ; 
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. 
Where should we have our thanks?" 

Horatio, the administrator of the mystery of 
Hamlet, who alone possesses the truth of the change 
of the 'commission' by Hamlet, replies, referring 
to King Claudius : 

" Not from his mouth 
Had it th' ability of life to thank you; 
He never gave commandment for their death. 
But since, so jump upon this bloody question, 
You from the Polack wars, and you from England, 
Are here arrived, give order that these bodies 
High on a stage be placed to the view ; 
And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world 
How these things came about : so shall you hear, 



The Secret of Hatnlet, 117 

Of carnal^ bloody, and unnatural acts ; 
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; 
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause* 
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook 
Fall'n on the inventors' heads : all this can I 
Truly deliver." 

Horatio's reference to * carnal,' bloody, and un- 
natural acts is explained by the revelation of the 
Ghost of the elder Hamlet to the Prince of Den- 
mark, and by him communicated to Horatio. It 
refers to Gertrude's unfaithfulness — her alliance 
with Claudius, her husband's brother — the sin that 
brought forth death : the death of the elder Hamlet 
by the hand of Claudius, his brother. The ' acci- 
dental judgments,' 'casual slaughters,' ' deaths put 
on by cunning and forced cause,' refer to the ' acci- 
dental ' death of Polonius, the execution of Rosen- 
crantz and Guildenstern, the insanity and acciden- 
tal death of Ophelia, the poisoning of Gertrude ; 
the 'purposes mistook fall'n on the inventors' 
heads ' — Claudius and Laertes — their treachery and 
death, and finally the death of the Prince of Den- 
mark. 

Fortinbras is eager to hear Horatio, and desires 
* the noblest ' called ' to the audience : ' 

** Let us haste to hear it, 
And call the noblest to the audience. 
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune : 
I have some rights of memory in this Kingdom, 
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me. 

Horatio. Of that I shall have cause also to speak, 
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more — 
But let this same be presently perform'd. 



ii8 The Secret of Hainlet. 

Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance. 
On plots and errors, happen. 

Fortinbras. Let four captains 

Bear Hamlet, like a soldier to the stage; 
For he was likely, had he been put on, 
T' have proved most royally: and, for his passage, 
The soldiers' music and the rites of war 
Speak loudly for him, — 
Take up the bodies. — Such a sight as this 
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. — 
Go, bid the soldiers shoot." 

*' Hamlet has gained the haven for which he 
longed so often ; yet without bringing guilt on 
himself by his death : no fear that his sleep should 
have bad dreams in it now. Those whom he loved, 
his mother, Laertes, Ophelia, have all died guilt- 
less or forgiven. Late and under the strong com- 
pulsion of approaching death, he has done, and 
well done, the inevitable task from which his 
gentle nature shrank. 

"Why then, any further thought, in the awful 
presence of death, of crimes, conspiracies, ven- 
geance.? Think that he has been slain in battle, 
like his sea-king forefathers ; and let the booming 
cannon be his mourners." 



MOTTO. 

Adam gave the name, when the Lord had made his 

creature, 
For God led them in review, to see what man would 

call them. 
As they struck his senses, he proclaimed their sounds, 
A name for the distinguishing of each, a numeral by 

which it should be known : 
He specified the partridge by her cry, and the forest 

prowler by his roaring. 
The tree by its use, and the flower by its beauty, and 

everything according to its truth. 

— TUPPKR. 



(X19) 



XI. 
HORATIO AND OPHELIA. 

Shakespeare has intimated the characteristics 
of Horatio and Ophelia in the secret meaning of 
their names. The significant ' H ' is in the names 
Hamlet, Horatio, and Ophelia. The presence of 
this consonant in these names is evidently inten- 
tional, as is the absence of that letter in the names 
of the rest of the persons in the play. These three 
persons have an affinity for each other. Horatio is 
the friend of Hamlet and Ophelia, and Hamlet 
and Ophelia are lovers. 

We have seen the definition of the consonant H. 
It represents a human spirit, or spirit-life. The 
rest of Horatio's name defines the character of this 
friend of Hamlet and Ophelia. ' Oratio ' signifies 
' discourse,' ' breath,' ' flow of speech ;' and Hora- 
tio is a person w^hose eloquent and smooth flowing 
life goes on uninterrupted and unhindered, quite 
a contrast to the hindered life of his friend Hamlet. 

Horatio is a noble character ; a clear, calm head 
and a good heart ; not a ' slave of passion ; ' but 
one whose personal life could only be described as 
a living oration. Horatio means ' uncertain,' 
* cautious.' He and Hamlet are friends and fellow- 
students, and this ' scholar-skeptic,' the embodi- 

(120) 



The Secret of Hamlet. 121 

merit of philosophy and morality, is Hamlet's ideal 
of manhood : 

'■^Hamlet. Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man 
As e'er my conversation coped withal. 

Horatio. O, my dear lord. 

Hamlet. Nay, do not think I flatter ; 

For what advancement may I hope from thee, 
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits, [flatter'd? 

To feed and clothe thee.? Why shouldst the poor be 
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, 
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee 
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou near? 
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, 
And could of men distinguish, her election 
Hath seal'd thee for herself: for thou hast been 
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; 
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards 
Hath ta'en with equal thanks : and blest are those 
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, 
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, 
As I do thee!" 

The esoteric meaning of Ophelia suggests her 
character in a poetic way. There is a primary and 
a secondary meaning hidden in the name. ' Ope ' 
means 'open;' ' helios ' means 'the sun,' and 
Ophelia would mean literally an 'open sun,' or 
' sunshine.' 

The secondary meaning refers to her mental 
Ophelia, or aphelia, and describes her condition 
when ' divided from herself and her fair judgment.' 
No word describes the character of Ophelia but 
'sunshine.' She is the 'sunshine' of Hamlet's 



123 The Secret of Ha?nlct. 

life, and this name ' lights up ' some of the dark 
phrases of the play. To illustrate : when the King 
says to Hamlet : 

'■'■King. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? 
Hamlet. Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun." 

In this reply Hamlet has a three-fold meaning. 
His first meaning is an intended antithesis to the 
King. He opposes 'sun' to 'clouds.' 'In the 
sun ' meant proverbially ' out of the house or 
home,' that is, homeless; and Hamlet, since the 
death of his father and marriage of his mother to 
Claudius, regards himself as ' in the sun ' — ' with- 
out the charities of home and kindness, exposed to 
the social inclemencies of the world.' 

But the answer is intended not only for the King 
and Queen, but for Polonius and Laertes. The 
father and brother of Ophelia — who is the ' sun- 
shine ' of the court — look with suspicion upon 
Hamlet's attentions to Ophelia, and they doubtless 
understood the reference. Claudius addresses 
Hamlet as 'my son,' and Hamlet replies in an 
undertone : 'A little more than kin and less than 
kind.' Claudius is ' a little more than kin,' being 
his uncle, and, by marriage, his father : he is twice 
kin. And he is also ' less than kind ' because of 
the unnatural marriage — against nature, as Hamlet 
regards it. Shakespeare is partial to the primitive 
use of words : 'And God said, Let the earth 
bring forth the living creature after his kind,' after 
his nature : so ' less than kind ' would mean unnat- 
ural. The reference of Hamlet to ' sun ' may also 



The Secret of Hainlet. 123 

have been a sarcastic answer to ' son,' as used by 
the King. 

Ophelia is the only ' sunshine ' that can dispel 
the cloud and darkness of Hamlet's life. Polonius 
speaks to Ophelia in reference to Hamlet : 

" 'Tis told me, he hath very often of late 
Given private time to you ; and you yourself 
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous." 

Hamlet speaks from the standpoint of Polonius, 
when in reference to the ' private time ' given to 
Ophelia, he makes reference in his words : 

** I am too much i' the sun." 

Ophelia is referred to by Laertes, her brother, as 
the ' rose of May,' and the philosophy of her 
brother accounts for her mental sun going from its 
sane orbit into its aphelia state : 

'* Nature is fine in love; and where 'tis fine 
It sends some precious instance of itself 
After the thing it loves." 

The mental sun of Ophelia shines no more in the 
court; it has followed 'after the thing it loves,' 
and is in a state of aphelia. "The violence her 
feelings suffered in the constrained repulse of her 
lover after she had ' suck'd the honey of his music 
vows ; ' her tender grief at his subsequent condi- 
tion, which is all the greater that she thinks herself 
the cause of it; the shock of her father's sudden 
and violent death — the father whom she loves with 
such religious entireness — and this by the hand of 
that same lover, and in consequence of the madness 
into which, as she believes, her own action has cast 



124 "-^^^ Secret of IIa?nlet. 

him ; all these causes join in producing her lapse of 
reason, and all reappear more or less in what comes 
from her afterwards. Her insanity is complete, 
unconscious, and such as it is said never ends but 
with the sufferer's death. There is no method in 
it : she is like one walking and talking in her sleep, 
her mind still busy, but its sources of activity all 
within ; literally ' incapable of her own distress.' " 

Ophelia in Greek means a ' serpent,' and from 
the standpoint of Hamlet, at a certain crisis of his 
life, the ' rose of May,' the ' sunshine of the court,' 
has become a ' serpent-temptress ' to the ' Prince of 
Denmark : ' for there is nothing good or bad, but 
thinking makes it so. 

Hamlet has received the revelation of the super- 
natural command to restore order in the ' Kingdom 
of Denmark.' But the imposed law of duty is 
accompanied by the injunction : 

*' But, howsoever thou pursues! this act, 

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
Against thy mother aught." 

Time and manner are left to Hamlet ; only he is 
to keep himself from crime and dishonor : his 
revenge must be righteous and according to the 
demands of justice, not personal. His character is 
the key to his conduct under the difficulties of his 
situation. It is not a matter between Hamlet and 
Claudius; the people of Denmark have rights 
involved in the question. Hamlet feels the neces- 
sity of his acts being in accordance with justice 
and the imposed conditions of judgment. The 
honor of Denmark must be restored : but the 



The Secret of Hainlet. 125 

Prince of Denmark must not further dishonor the 
Kingdom by personal revenge. Hamlet's feeling 
on the point of honor is shown in his dying 
moments when he says : 

** O good Horatio ! what a wounded name, 
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me ! 
If ever thou didst hold me in thy heart, 
Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
To tell my story." 

Ophelia appears to Hamlet as a ' serpent- 
temptress,' to keep him from carrying out the law 
of duty imposed by the supernatural command of 
his father. He now thinks Ophelia an instrument 
of Claudius, and this accounts for his words and 
treatment of her in the scene where she desires to 
return his ' remembrances ' — gifts. 

Claudius means ' lame,' ' defective : ' 

" So, oft it chances in particular men, 

That for some vicious mole of nature in them. 

As, in their birth — wherein they are not guilty, 

Since nature can not choose his origin, — 

By the o'ergrowth of some complexion. 

Oft breathing down the pales and forts of reason ; 

Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens 

The form of plausive manners, that these men, — 

Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, 

Being nature's livery, or fortune's star, — 

Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace, 

As infinite as man may undergo — 

Shall in the general censure take corruption 

From that particular fault; the dram of leav'n 

Doth all the noble substance of 'em sour, 

To his own scandal." 



126 The Secret of Ha77ilet. 

The revelation of the elder Hamlet throws light 
upon Claudius. He is the 'serpent,' the 'sensual- 
ist,' the ' deceiver, ' seducer,' ' liar : ' 

** Now, Hamlet, hear: 
'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, 
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark 
Is by a forged process of my death 
Rankly abused; but know, thou noble youth. 
The serpent that did sting thy father's life 
Now wears his crown." 

Claudius alienated Gertrude, the Eve of the 
elder Hamlet's paradise, and poisoned him in his 
own garden while asleep, and compassed the 
election to the throne of Denmark. 

Esoterically, Shakespeare intends by this history 
in the drama — the genesis revelation of the Ghost 
— that that affection of our nature which disposes 
us to delight in the gratification of sense, if listened 
to and obeyed will deprive us of our kingship, and 
usurp the ' throne of inner dominion ' in the ' king- 
dom within.' That love and lust are near akin — 
outwardly brothers, but not really so ; as different 

as 

" Hyperion to a satyr." 

And that lust always murders love : discrowns and 
usurps the kingdom of man : 

'* For thou dost know, O Damon, dear, 
This realm dismantled was 
Of Jove himself; and now reigns here 
A very, very — pajock." 

Hamlet in the above improvised poetical address 
to his friend Horatio, calls him Damon, and says 



The Secret of Hamlet. 127 

that the realm of Denmark was dismantled of a 
king who had the majesty of Jove, and that the 
reigning king is but ' a very, very — pajock.' 

In Shakespeare's time the ' pajock ' — peacock — 
had a very bad character. It was the accredited 
representative of inordinate pride and envy, as 
well as of unnatural cruelty and lust — the Claudius 
among the fauna. 

Man's moral nature includes in its possibilities all 
animal dispositions ; and as any one of them ac- 
quires an undue predominance, so the man is 
described. The animals are each a distinct incar- 
nation of one human quality. Man is the embodi- 
ment of all animal qualities and characteristics : he 
is the comprehensive aggregate of all. Man is at 
present a self-discordant being. His moral nature 
— what is it but a growling menagerie? Or, to 
use the expressive language of Paul : ' ' The flesh 
lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against 
the flesh, for these are contrary the one to the 
other." Plato sets forth this same truth in his 
allegory of the Winged Steeds : the one of noble 
breed soaring heavenward; the other of ignoble, 
plunging earthward. And Shakespeare : 

" The state of man, 
Like a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection ! " 

The Claudius in Man rules, the inner realm is 
dismantled, and the ideal man is called upon as a 
prince to assert moral order, and in the heaven- 
ordained way ascend the ' throne of inner domin- 
ion.' Claudius must be dethroned and Hamlet 



128 The Secret of Ha?7tlet. 

enthroned ; not by annihilating the passions, but by- 
transfiguring them. The Hamlet within must obey 
the Hamlet without. He is the Prince, the poten- 
tial King. He must be about ' his father's busi- 
ness,' and in his father's way, transfigure the 
instinct of accumulation into moral acquisition ; 
ambition into philanthropy ; vengeance into for- 
giveness — literally overcoming evil with good. 

T> ^f> •t^ 5jC ?JC 

Furness says of Hamlet : " No one of mortal 
mould (save Him ' whose blessed feet were nailed 
for our advantage to the bitter cross') ever trod 
this earth, commanding such absorbing interest as 
this Hamlet, this mere creation of a poet's brain. 
No syllable that he whispers, no word let fall by 
any one near him, but is caught and pondered as 
no words ever have been, except of Holy Writ. 
Upon no throne built by mortal hands has ever 
' beat so fierce a light ' as upon that airy fabric 
reared at Elsinore." But Furness failed to see the 
reason of the universal interest. Hamlet is the 
ideal of genius, the heir apparent to the throne of 
inner dominion, the dramatic personification of the 
Saviours of life, the Messiah of the mental world, 
the prince of the personal cosmos, whose advent 
causes the thrones of earth trouble, and through 
whose struggle moral order is asserted and 
achieved. 

* * * * 

The outward disposition of the audience in the 
* play within the play,' reveals the truth of an 
inner drama. It is Hamlet's ' mouse-trap ' to 



The Secret of Hamlet, 129 

catch the ' royal mouse ' — ' the conscience of the 
King.' Hamlet is at the feet of Ophelia, and 
Horatio is near Hamlet. The outward relation of 
* nearness ' reveals the inner reality of ' friendship ' 
and ' love ' — Hamlet is at the feet of Ophelia. The 
King, Queen, and officers of state are opposite the 
trio of friends. They are in reality opposed, in 
thought and sympathy. The scene of the murder 
of the elder Hamlet passes before the eyes of the 
King. That scene is ever before the inner eye of 
the King. 

***** 

Claudius is unmasked, and Hamlet is convinced 
of the honesty of the ' Ghost.' In an interview 
with his mother, he catches the conscience of the 
Queen, kills her Minister of State, and the result 
of the recent happenings is the insanity and death 
of Ophelia. Her mental sun declines, and she, in 
a state of mental aphelia, dies. 

Hamlet is sent to England, his ' cherub ' delivers 
him, and the evil intended for him by the King 
recoils upon the heads of his two courtiers. 

*' The sight is dismal ; 
And our affairs from England come too late : 
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, 
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd, 
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. 
Where should we have our thanks?" 



Horatio promises to tell ' the unknowing world 
how these things came about : ' 

9 



I JO The Secret of Hamlet. 

*' Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; 
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; 
Of deaths put on bj cunning and forc'd cause. 
And in the upshot, purposes mistook 
Fallen on the inventors' heads." 



Hamlet has played his part ; he leaves the visible 
stage, and goes into the world where he finds 
answers to the questions that agitated him here — 
'the rest is silence.' 



MOTTOES. 

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 

And in imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown; the poet's pen 

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 

A local habitation and a name. 

Miranda. How came we ashore? 
Prospero. By Providence divine. 

— The Tempest. 

Admir'd Miranda, 
Indeed, the top of admiration. 

At the first sight 
They have changed eyes. 

And like the baseless fabric of this vision. 

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 

The solemn temples, the great globe itself — 

Yea, all which it inherit — shall dissolve, 

And like this insubstantial pageant faded 

Leave not a rack behind. — The Tempest. 



(i3t) 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE SEQUEL TO HAMLET. 

'*The Tempest," says Campbell, " has a sort of 
sacredness as the last work of a mighty workman. 
Shakespeare, as if conscious that it would be his 
last, and as if inspired to typify himself, has made 
his hero a natural, a dignified, and benevolent ma- 
gician, who could conjure up spirits from the vasty 
deep, and command supernatural agency by the 
most seemingly natural and simple means. And 
the final play of our poet has magic indeed ; for, 
what can be simpler in language than the courtship 
of Ferdinand and Miranda, and yet what can be 
more magical than the sympathy with which it 
subdues us? Here Shakespeare himself is Prospero, 
or rather the superior genius who commands both 
Prospero and Ariel. But the time was approaching 
when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff, and 
tc bury it fathoms in the ocean. 

'Deeper than did ever plummet sound.' That 
staff has never been, and never will be recovered. 
And Ulrici has said, " 'The Tempest ' is the com- 
pleting companion-piece of the ' Winter's Tale,' 
and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' " 

****** 

Shakespeare embodies the principal superstitions 
of his age in several dramas : Fairies are represented 
(132) 



The Secret of Hamlet. 133 

in A Midsummer Night's Dream' — ghostly visi- 
tants in ' Hamlet ' — witches and night-hags in 
* Macbeth ' — aerial spirits and necromancers in 
*The Tempest.' The lessons of 'The Tempest' 
are — the mutability of regal sway, the blessedness 
of forgiveness, and the happiness of that man who 
can say — 

*' My mind to me a kingdom is." 

****** 

'The Tempest ' is a projected condition of affairs 
beyond the grave, where results of causes in life are 
realized. Prospero, as the name indicates, is Hu- 
manity typified in the realized glory of achievement. 
Struggle is over with the ' hindered ' Hamlet, and 
he is now no longer in adversity, but a prosperous 
person, still pursuing his occult studies, the ruler in 
the realm of Mind. Thought is personified as the 
supreme force, in Prospero who controls the en- 
chanted island and rules in the realm of Mind. 

Hamlet in his ' hindered ' state, before he became 
Prospero, was ever shaken with ' thoughts beyond 
the reaches of our souls.' ' Why is this ? wherefore ? 
what should we do ? ' These queries of the higher 
self — the potential Prospero, were continually de- 
manding solution. 

After death Hamlet as Prospero upon his rightful 
throne ' transported and wrapt in secret studies,' 
' neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated to closeness 
and the bettering of his mind with that which 
o'erprised all popular rate.' Now Hamlet has his 
powers, the sign of which is the mantle. 

Victor Hugo says that " the ' Midsummer Night's 



134 ^^^^ Secret of Hamlet. 

Dream ' depicts the action of the invisible world on 
man, but ' The Tempest ' symbolizes the action of 
man on the invisible world. In the poet's youth, 
man obeys the spirits. In the poet's ripe age, the 
spirits obey man." Hamlet is controlled by the 
spirit world — its influence is upon him ; but when he 
rises through death as Prospero, he controls the 
spirits. 

Psychology suggests that living thought becomes 
a real embodiment which may be perceived by the 
finer senses. 'And their works do follow with 
them,' the literal rendering of the Greek in the 
classic passage of the Revelation of St. John, would 
also suggest the possibilities of living deeds. Cali- 
ban — a metathesis for Cannibal — the Claudius carried 
by judgment from guilty rule of one world to abject 
slavery in another ; a real judgment metathesis of 
character and personality, suggests the final gloss to 
the teaching of all Shakespeare's dramas ; ' What- 
soever a man soweth that also shall he reap.' ' In 
esoteric thought the perfected being must be an 
equal blending of the masculine and feminine,' and 
in ' Prospero, the gentle, refined element of mother- 
hood, blended with sublime dignity and strength,' 
is realized. 

In the world of time and sense the ' hindered ' 
Hamlet caught a glimpse of the ' cherub that sees ;' 
but above the limitations of time and space, ' his 
child is to him a cherubim infusing him with forti- 
tude from heaven,' and ' he gave to her the richest 
dower of inheritance — knowledge, with purity of 
heart and purpose.' The Ophelia of Hamlet be- 



The Secret of Hamlet, 135 

comes the cherubic Miranda of Prospero. The re- 
pentant Polonius appears as the ' good Gonzalo,' 
the ' true preserver ' and ' loyal sir.' 

Prospero — Shakespeare's ultimate ideal man — 
♦♦ sits 'mongst men like a descended God." 

He is no longer the ' hindered ' Hamlet, but the 
ruler of the enchanted world beyond the shore line 
of eternity. 

Miranda with the relics of an Ophelia conscious- 
ness asks : 

** How came we ashore? 

Prospero. By Providence Divine. 

Miranda. Had I not 

Four or five women once that tended me ? 

Prospero. Thou hadst, and more, Miranda: but how is it 
That this lives in thy mind ? What seest thou else, 
In the dark backward and abysm of time ? 
If thou rememberest aught ere thou cam'st here, 
How thou cam'st here thou may'st." 

******* 

And Caliban with a Claudius consciousness of the 
past wrong-doing, suggests future evil along the 
line of the guilty past. Speaking of Prospero, he 
says : 

^'■Caliban. Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him 
I' the afternoon to sleep : then thou may'st brain him." 

This from Caliban suggests the words of the elder 
Hamlet : 

** Sleep within my orchard, 
My custom always in the afternoon." 

All the characters in ' Hamlet, Prince of Den- 
mark,' * passing through nature to eternity,' reap- 
pear in the ' Tempest.' 



136 The Secret of Hamlet. 

*^ Ariel. You are three men of sin, whom Destiny 
(That hath to instrument this lower world 
And what is in 't) the never-surfeited sea 
Hath caused to belch up ; and on this island, 
Where man doth not inhabit: you, 'mongst men. 
Being most unfit to live. 

But remember, 
For that's my business to you, that you three 
From Milan did supplant good Prospero; 
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it. 
Him and his innocent child : for which foul deed 
The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have 
Incens'd the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures. 
Against your peace. 



Gertrude is now the Sycorax of 'The Tempest,' 
and still holds Claudius — Caliban — in bondage as a 
slave-son. As Claudius ruled Hamlet, so Prospero 
rules Caliban. 

****** 

" Solemn are the words that the spirit speaks to 
the three men of sin, who from Milan did supplant 
good Prospero. He comes forth from his cell in his 
magic robes. Ariel is by his side. It is the sixth 
hour of the day, when the enchanter had promised 
that the spirit's work should cease. In the progress 
of that work the spirit has caught something of 
human sympathies. If you now behold, says Ariel, 
those upon whom your charm so strongly works, 
your affections would become tender. Hast thou, 
says Prospero, which art but air, a touch, a feeling 
of their afflictions, and shall not myself, one of their 
kind, be kindlier moved than thou art? Go release 
them. Solemn is the invocation which precedes 



The Secret of Hamlet, 137 

Prospero's renunciation of his rough magic ; and 
solemn is the scene in which those who have been 
distraught are gradually disenchanted. As the 
charm dissolves apace, they hear the story of Pros- 
pero's wrongs ; and at length the rightful Duke of 
Milan stands before them in the garb of a former 
time. The King of Naples entreats pardon. Pros- 
pero forgives even that most wicked sir, whom he 
will not call brother. Then comes the last surprise. 
The interior of Prospero's cell is disclosed, and 
there Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess in 
the security and ease of a life-long affection, after 
an acquaintance of three hours. The benevolent 
enchanter has worked out his most Christian victory 
over evil, and has secured the happiness of his dear 
beloved; and now to Milan, where every third 
thought shall be a thought of his grave." 

****** 

In the shipwreck of the Apostle Paul, Shake- 
speare finds suggestions for 'The Tempest.' 

"And when it was determined that we should sail 
into Italy, they delivered Paul and certain other 
prisoners unto one named Julius, a centurion of 
Augustus' band." " But not long after there arose 
against it a tempestuous wind, called Euroclydon. 
And when the ship was caught and could not bear 
up into the wind, we let her drive. And running 
under a certain island which is called Clauda, we 
had much work to come by the boat. And we being 
exceedingly tossed with a tempest, the next day 
they lightened the ship. And when neither sun nor 
Stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest 



138 The Secret of Hamlet. 

lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was 
taken away." (Acts xxvii : 1-44.) 

The Angel (Ariel) cheered Paul, and assured 
him that all on board should be saved, but the ship 
would be lost. ' Howbeit we must be cast upon a 
certain' island.' 'And falling into a place where 
two seas met (Time and Eternity), they ran the 
ship aground.' 'And the rest, some on boards and 
some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it 
came to pass, that they escaped all safe to the 
land.' 

The numan body is wrecked where two seas 
meet (time and eternity), but the passenger escapes 
and lives in a higher spiritual body. ' The wheel 
comes full circle,' and the judgment, 'metathesis,' 
can not be escaped, ' for we must all give account 
for the deeds done in the body ' — ship of the 
human spirit. 

****** 

Life is a ' sea of troubles ; ' death, the storm and 
' Tempest ' of Life, is a place where two seas — time 
and eternity — meet, and this, to every human 
spirit, is the occasion of the wreck of the body — 
ship of humanity. This esoteric truth is the soul 
of the exoteric facts of Paul's shipwreck and the 
Tempest of Shakespeare. The relation is too ob- 
, vious to require more than to call attention to the 
fact. 

Antonio the usurper — with Alonzo, King of 
Naples, his son Prince Ferdinand, his brother 
Sebastian, and many courtiers — had put to sea for 
the purpose of visiting in Tunis, a city of northern 
Africa, a daughter of the King of Naples. Pros- 



The Secret of Hamlet, 139 

pero, by his art, and by the instrumentality of cer- 
tain spirits of the island — the chief agent among 
these immaterial existences being a tricksy little 
spirit called Ariel — raises a tempest, by the violence 
of which the royal voyagers are thrown upon this 
lonely island, its only human inhabitants being 
Prospero and his daughter Miranda. The vessel is 
stranded ; the death-shrieks of the passengers and 
crew are heard ; all appears to be lost, and ' a thou- 
sand furlongs of sea would be gladly exchanged for 
an acre of barren ground.' 

Miranda and Prospero stand at the entrance of 
the Cell, watching the effects of the Tempest 
which his power has raised. The fears of Miranda 
are allayed, and her 'piteous heart' quieted by 

Prospero : 

•* The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touched 
The very virtue of compassion in thee, 
I have, with such precision in mine art, 
So safely ordered that there is no loss- 
No, not so much perdition as a hair 
Betide to any creature in the vessel, 
What thou heard'st cry, what thou saw'st sink. 
Sit down; 
For thou must now know further." 

Prospero tells Miranda of the past : 
** Twelve years since, 
Miranda — twelve years since — 
Thy father was the Duke of Milan, 
And— a Prince of power. 

Miranda. Oh, the Heavens ! 

What foul play had we that we came from thence ? 
Or blessed was 't, we did? 

Prospero. Both, both, my girl : 
By foul play, as thou say' st, were we heaved thence— 
But blessedly helped hither ! " 



140 772^ Seci'ct of Hamlet. 

He continues, speaking of his false brother, and 
* thy uncle, called Antonio :' 

^^Prospero. I, thus neglecting worldly ends, in my 
false brother 
Awaked an evil nature; hence, his ambition growing, 
He needs will be Absolute Milan. 
Me, poor man ! my library was dukedom large enough.'* 

He tells Miranda how she preserved him from 
despair : 

*■'■ Prosper o. Oh, a cherubim 
Thou wast, that didst preserve me. 
Miranda. How came we ashore.? 
Prospero. By Providence divine." 

He then explains that he has taught her : 

** Here have I, thy schoolmaster, 
Made thee more profit than other princes can. 
That have more time for vainer hours, 
And tutors not so careful. [pray you, sir — 

Miranda. Heavens thank you for't! And now I 
For still 'tis beating in my mind — your reason 
For raising this sea-storm.?" 

Prospero gives only the explanation that fortune 
favors him and has brought his enemies to the 
shore. Then using his hypnotic power he says : 

•' Here cease more questions. 
Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness. 
And give it way : I know thou can not choose. 
{Miranda sleeps. y^ 

Like a ball of fire, Ariel, the gentle and familiar 
spirit, wheels down to give an account of the tem- 
pest, and of his circumspective care for the royal 
passengers and crew. 



The Secret of Hamlet. 141 

^* Ariel. Not a soul 

But felt a fever of the mad, and played 
Some tricks of desperation. All (but mariners) 
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, — 
When all afire with me, the King's son, Ferdinand, 
With hair up-staring (then like reeds, not hair). 
Was the first man that leaped ; and cried, * Hell is empty, 
And all the devils are here.' 

Prospcro, Why, that's my Spirit! " 

Prospero (the elder Hamlet) recognizes Ferdi- 
nand (the younger Hamlet) : 

"Why, that's my spirit! 
But are they, Ariel, safe? 

Ariel. The King's son I have landed myself.'* 



Next, Ariel, as a sea-nymph, is about to perform 
Prospero's commission, and to compel the attention 
of the rescued Ferdinand. Invisibly, Ariel hovers 
around the Prince, and sings strange intelligence of 
his drowned father. 

The enchanted music captivates the young Prince 
(Hamlet) to follow. Ariel conducts him to the 
cave, where Prospero (elder Hamlet) and Miranda 
(Ophelia) are now standing : 

'■*■ Prospero. The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, 
And say what thou seest yond'. 

Miranda. What is't? A spirit? I might call him 
A thing divine, for nothing natural 
I ever saw so noble." 

Ferdinand (young Hamlet) stands wrapt in equal 
admiration. The spell-bound Prince obeys, willing 



1^2 The Secret of Hainlet, 

to endure the imprisonment which is inaugurated 
by love. But the aim of Prospero almost justified 
the temporary wrong. It is by the marriage of 
Miranda and Ferdinand that he is not only to in- 
sure his own restoration to the dukedom, but to 
secure for his daughter her lost honors, and to res- 
cue his native land from disgraceful vassalage to a 
foreign power. 

'• We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." 

******* 

Humanity, in its struggles, is typified in Hamlet, 
Prince of Denmark. The elder Hamlet, young 
Hamlet, Ophelia, and Horatio are all used in 
typifying the struggle of man in "this lower 
world." So in the world after the tempest, Pros- 
pero, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Miranda are used to 
represent the glory of realized achievement. 

^'•Alonzo. I long 

To hear the story of your life, which must 
Take the ear strangely. 

Prospero. I'll deliver all; 

And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales, 
And sail so expeditious, that shall catch 
Your royal fleet far off. My Ariel — chick — 
That is thy charge ; then to the elements — 
Be free, and fare thou well ! 

Now my charms are all o'erthrown, 
And what strength I have's my own, 
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true, 
I must be here confined by you. 



The Secret of Hamlet. 143 

Or sent to Naples. Let me not, — 
Since I have my dukedom got, 
And pardoned the deceiver, — dwell 
In this base island, by your spell; 
But release me from my bonds, 
With the help of your hands. 
Gentle breath of yours my sails 
Must fill, or else my project fails — 
Which was to please. Now, I want 
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; 
And my ending is despair. 
Unless I be relieved by prayer, — 
Which pierces so, that it assaults 
Mercy itself, and frees all faults. 
As you from crimes would pardoned be, 
Let your indulgence set me free." 



INDIRECTION. 

Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle 

suggestion is fairer; 
Rare is the rose-burst of dawn, but the secret that clasps 

it is rarer ; 
Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes 

it is sweeter; 
And never was poem yet writ but the meaning outmastered 

the meter. 

Never a daisy that grows but a mystery guideth the 

growing; 
Never a river that flows but a majesty scepters the flowing; 
Never a Shakespeare that soared but a stronger than he 

did enfold him; 
Nor ever a prophet fortells but a mightier seer hath 

foretold him. 

Back of the canvas that throbs the painter is hinted 

and hidden ; 
Into the statue that breathes the soul of the sculptor is 

bidden ; 
Under the joy that is felt lie the infinite issues of feeling; 
Crowning the glory revealed is the glory that crowns the 

revealing. 

Great are the symbols of being, but that which is symboled 

is greater; 
Vast to create and uphold, but vaster the inward creator. 
Back of the sound broods the silence, back of the gift 

stands the giving; 
Back of the hands that receive thrill the sensitive nerves 

of receiving. 

Space is as nothing to spirit, the deed is outdone by the 

doing; 
The heart of the wooer is warm, but warmer the heart of 

the wooing; 
And up from the pits where these shiver, and up from the 

heigiits where those shine. 
Twin voices and shadows swim starward, and the essence 

of life is divine. 

(X44) 



EPILOGUE. 

Genius is partial in its treatment of life to the 
epic and dramatic form of expression. Homer and 
Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and 
Shakespeare and Goethe were dramatists. Life in 
action is best treated in the epic or dramatic form. 
The representations of life upon the elevated stage 
finds its complement in the elevated speech of the 
drama, for the drama deals with ideal persons, and 
the speech needs to be elevated above the tone of 
ordinary life. 

Hamlet's instruction to the player reveals the 
"purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first 
and now, was and is to hold, as it were, the mirror 
up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn 
her own image, and the very age and body of the 
time his form and pressure." But nature is not the 
same in the mirror ; the reflection of the mirror 
' lends enchantment to the view,' and so the mirror- 
reflection of the stage — the elevated tone — ' blank 
verse ' — is the most suitable glass to receive the 
silvering of the genius-mind behind it. 

Philosophy finds the ultimate meaning of the 
universe under the notion of the ego ; poetry looks 
through the worlds of time and space as through 
the sublime symbol to the eternal beauty ; morality, 
as the victorious struggle of the personal soul after 
righteousness, discovers God through life. " These 

lO (145) 



146 The Secret of Hamlet. 

three great expressions of the human spirit must 
ever remain, but the greatest of the three is the 
vital and victorious moral movement." 

Shakespeare's Hamlet is full of the deepest phi- 
losophy and poetry of indescribable beauty, and 
the ' victorious moral movement ' as it struggles, 
overcomes, and finally asserts moral order, achiev- 
ing its glorious destiny, is expressed characteris- 
tically as the dramatic form of representation. 
Hamlet is the drama of life, the tragedy of hu- 
manity, the voyage of the human spirit in its body- 
ship through the sea of life, sometimes in calm 
waters reflecting the heavens above, then in dark- 
ness a very sea of troubles. Hamlet is man — every 
man : 

" Behold, thou art pilot of the ship, and owner of that 

freighted galleon, 
Competent, with all thy weakness, to steer into safety 

or be lost: 
Compass and chart are in thy hand : roadstead and 

rocks thou knowest; 
Thou art warned of reefs and shallows ; thou beholdest 

the harbor and its lights." 

Hamlet is the ' enchanted view ' of the dramatic 
voyage of humanity through the sea of life. Ten- 
nyson in ' The Play,' thus speaks of the mystery of 
life: 

Act first — this earth, a stage so gloomed with woe 
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 

And yet be patient. One playwright may show, 
In some fifth act, what this wild drama means," 

"The phenomena of spiritual life," says Lyman 
Abbott, " are complex. They can not be divided 



The Secret of Hamlet. 147 

into compartments. Life is like an ocean voyage : 
to-day the sea is glass, to-morrow it is lashed into 
fury by a cyclone. The scientist may study the 
causes of the cyclone, and even accurately define 
the vehemence of wind necessary to constitute one ; 
but the dramatist describes now the beauty of the 
calm, now the grandeur of the tempest, and neither 
draws nor recognizes the sharp lines which separate 
light winds from a stiff breeze, or a stiff breeze 
from a tornado. In every man, saint and sinner 
alike, is an element of lawlessness. The imperfect 
impulses are not brought wholly into subjection to 
the law of Christ. The best of men is partly a 
wild animal not wholly tamed. Doubtless there 
are some men of so low a standard of life that 
conflict between the higher and lower nature is 
almost wholly unknown, because the higher nature 
has never been sufficiently developed to assert 
itself; others of so impassionate a nature, of im- 
pulses so feeble, that a rational self-interest finds 
no difficulty in always maintaining an unquestioned 
ascendency ; still others so born and bred, with 
such natural equilibrium of nature that the anguish 
and the exhilaration of spiritual conflict are alike 
absolutely unknown to them. But he who has by 
nature both 'strong passions and high ideals, both 
intense impulses and a vigorous and exacting con- 
science, will know periods of intensity of conflict 
between the two ; with sometimes the dread depres- 
sion of defeat, and sometimes the unutterable joy 
of victory. Such a man, of intense nature and 
variant moods, and consquent changeful phases of 



148 The Secret of Hamlet, 

experience, will pass by sudden transition from 
calm to tempest, and from tempest to calm again." 

** This is mere madness : 
And thus a while the fit will work on him ; 
Anon, as patient as the female dove, 
When that her golden couplets are disclosed. 
His silence will sit drooping." 

The first state of the soul is that of innocence. 
Whatever dormant capacity for good or evil there 
may be in the babe, there is in him neither vice nor 
virtue. The drama of the Garden of Eden is 
repeated in every life. Every babe is an Adam. 
Every Adam is a Hamlet. Thus it is that law, the 
direct end of which is to develop virtue out of in- 
nocence by strife, affords a vantage-ground for sin ; 
it becomes an instrument of sin. Progress upward 
and progress downward go on together in the his- 
tory of the race : the one by obedience, the other 
by disobedience. It is this double progress under 
law which deceives men ; and according as one 
looks on the better side of life, the evolution of 
virtue through obedience, or on the worse side of 
life, the evolution of vice through disobedience, 
is he optimist or pessimist. Out of this (naval) 
battle of life, between the higher nature (facul- 
ties) that perceives the law of the divine life, and 
the impulses which can only learn obedience 
through strife and suffering, grow the mystery, 
fragmentariness, the unsatisfactory results of life. 
The law belongs to man as a child of God ; it is 
spiritual. But man still retains in him elements of 
an untamed nature : and these he suffers to rule 



The Secret of Hamlet. 149 

him, and their rule ' is the rule of anarchy and 
lawlessness.' 

" Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion, all the interim is 
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
The genius and the mortal instruments 
Are there in council : and the state of man, 
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection." 

DANISH SOURCE OF PLOT. 

The ultimate source of the plot of Hamlet is 
the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus (i. e., 
' the Lettered '), Denmark's first writer of import- 
ance, who lived at the close of the twelfth century. 
The tale of Hamlet, contained in the third and 
fourth books, is certainly the most striking of all 
Saxo's mystical hero-stories, quite apart from its 
Shakespearian interest, and Goethe's recognizing 
its dramatic possibilities, thought of treating the 
subject dramatically on the basis of Saxo's narra- 
tive. It is noteworthy that already in the fifteenth 
century the story was well known throughout the 
North, * trolled far and wide in popular song;' 
but its connection with the English drama was due 
to the French version given in Belleforest's Histo- 
ries Tragiqucs^ the Hamlet story first appearing in 
the fifth volume, published in 1570. 

Few studies in literary origins are more instruc- 
tive than to examine how the ' rich, barbarous tale ' 
of the Danish historian has become transformed 
into the great soul tragedy of modern literature. 



150 The Secret of Hafnlet, 

In Saxo's Amleth we have at least the framework 
of Shakespeare's Hamlet : the murder of the father 
by a zealous uncle, the mother's incestuous marriage 
with the murderer, the son's feigned madness in 
order to execute revenge, these are the vague 
originals of Ophelia and Polonius ; the meeting of 
mother and son, the voyage to England, all these 
familiar elements are found in the old tale. But 
the ghost, the play-scene, and the culmination of 
the play in the death of the hero as well as of the 
objects of his revenge, these are elements which 
belong essentially to the machinery of the Eliza- 
bethan drama of vengeance. 

GREEK SOURCES OF PLOT. 

In Greek legendary history, Agamemnon is the 
son of Atreus, King of Mycenae, and the most 
powerful ruler in Greece. He led the Greek expe- 
dition against Troy, and on his return was slain, 
according to Homer by yEgisthus, according to 
yEschylus by his wife Clytemnestra, who was 
incited to the deed partly by jealousy of Cassandra, 
and partly through fear on account of her adultery 
with ^gisthus. It may be that Shakespeare had 
in mind Agamemnon as the suggestion of Hamlet 
the elder. King of Denmark. Agamemnon is the 
greatest of the tragedies of yEschylus. The scene 
is laid in Argos, in the palace of Agamemnon, at 
the time of the King's return from the capture of 
Troy; the catastrophe is the murder (behind the 
scenes) of Agamemnon and Cassandra (whom he 



The Secret of Hamlet. 151 

has brought captive with him) by the Queen Cly- 
temnestra, urged by her paramour ^gisthus. 

In the ' Electra ' of Sophocles, Man is repre- 
sented as forced in personal career by the Maerae, 
the Greek goddesses of fate. Homer uses the name 
in the singular as of a single divinity, and also in 
the plural. Ho also calls them the ' spinners of the 
thread of life.' By Hesioid they are spoken of 
both as daughters of Night and as daughters of 
Zeus and Hermis. They were represented as three 
in number: Clotho (the spinner), Lachasis (dis- 
poser of lots), and Atropos (the inevitable). The 
first spins the thread of life, the second fixes the 
length, and the third severs it. Agamemnon was 
King of Mycenae ; ^gisthus was an adopted son of 
Atreus, Agamemnon's father. ^gisthus slew 
Agamemnon and married with Clytemnestra, his 
queen. Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, 
mourned her father's death, and denounced the 
marriage of her mother with yEgisthus. Orestes 
(suggestive of Horatio in Hamlet), brother of 
Electra, bidden by the god of Delphi (suggestive 
of the Ghost of Hamlet's father) to revenge his 
father's death, sought out and slew the murderer. 
The interview between Electra and Clytemnestra, 
her mother, suggests the interview between Hamlet 
and his ' queen-mother.' 

Orestes hesitates like Hamlet, and defers the 
death of ^gisthus for the same reason that Hamlet 
defers the death of Claudius : 

^^ Orestes. Go thou within, and quickly. Now our strife 
Is not of words, but for thy life itself. 



153 The Secret of Hamlet. 

y^gisthus . Whj dost thou force me in? If this be right, 
What need of darkness? Why not slay at once? 

Orestes. Give thou no orders, but where thou didst slaj 
My father, go, that thou too there mayst die. 

u^gisthns. Dost think I'll flee? 

Orestes. Thou must not die the death thou wouldst desire, 
I needs must make it bitter." 

The Chorus protests against the mourning of 
Electra for her father : 

* Thou, O Electra, take good heed, wast born 
Of mortal father; mortal, too, Orestes; 
Yield not too much to grief. To suffer thus 
Is common lot of all." 

In Hamlet, the Queen thus protests : 

** Do not forever with thy veiled lids, 
Seek for thy noble father in the dust. 
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die, 
Passing through nature to eternity. 

Hamlet. Aye, madam, it is common." 

Electra bewails the fact that she must own the 
guilty Clytemnestra as her mother ; so Hamlet says : 

" You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife; 
And would it were not so ! — you are my mother." 

Electra, like Hamlet, uses words of double 
meaning. She also, like the Prince of Denmark, 
suspects the intentions of the King and Queen. 
Electra's sister says : 

*' All I know 
Myself, I'll tell thee; for their purpose is. 
Unless thou ceasest from thy wailings loud. 
To send thee where thou nevermore shalt see 
The light of day." 

Electra speaks of the hesitation of Orestes : 



The Secret of Hamlet. 153 

" For he, still ever meaning to effect 

Some great achievment, brings to nothingness 
All mj hopes here, and all mj hopes far away. 

And Hamlet, who seems to embody characteris- 
tics of both Electra and Orestes, is continually 
condemning himself for the same fault of procras- 
tination. 

The Chorus encourages Electra : 

''''Chorus. Take heart, my child, take heart; 
Mighty in Heaven He dwells, 
Zeus, seeing, guiding all." 

Hamlet suggests this : 

" There's a divinity that shapes our ends. 
Rough-hew them how we will." 

In Hamlet, Shakespeare refers to the Chorus^ a 
term used specifically in the ancient Greek drama : 

'^''Hamlet. This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King. 
Ophelia, You are as good as a chorus^ my lord. 

The chorus occupied in the theater a position be- 
tween the stage and the auditorium, and Hamlet in 
reality was the chorus of the ' play within the play.' 

ROMAN SOURCES OF THE PLOT. 

Man from the Roman point of view was also 
ruled by the gods into self-denial for the State. 
Aneas is a typical Roman, and in the ' ^neid, 
Virgil represents his Prince, endowed with noble 
qualities of mind and body : 

*' A very god in face and chest," 

suggesting Shakespeare's hero who was : 



154 The Secret of Hamlet. 

** The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's eje, tongue, sword, 
The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 
The observed of all observers." 

In classical legend, Aneas is a Trojan prince, 
son of Anchises, King of Dardania and Aphrodite, 
who, according to Roman tradition, settled in 
Latium and became the ancestral hero of the 
Roman people. This hero, driven by a storm on 
the coast of Africa, is hospitably received by Dido, 
Queen of Carthage, to whom he relates the fall of 
Troy and his wanderings. An attachment between 
them is broken by the departure of Aneas, in 
obedience to the will of the gods, and the suicide 
of Dido follows. After a visit to Sicily, Aneas 
lands at Cumae in Italy. In a descent to the 
infernal regions he sees his father, Anchises, and 
has a prophetic vision of the glorious destiny of 
his race as well as the future heroes of Rome. 

Palinurus, the pilot ot the fleet of Aneas, and 
his fate, when a human guide was indispensable, 
suggests Polonius, the ' pilot ' of the ship of Den- 
mark — ship of state, and his fate, when King 
Claudius needed him most. Aneas is introduced 
by Virgil in the midst of dire calamities. The 
King is murdered and the hopes of the Prince are 
blasted. 

The Ghost of Hector appears and is addressed by 
Aneas : 

*• O day-star of Dardanian land! 

O faithful heart, unconquered hand ! 
What means this lingering? From what shore 
Comes Hector to his home once more? 
* * * * * 



The Secret of Hamlet, 155 

What cause has moved that clear, calm mien ? 
Or why those wounds, so ghastly green? " 

In answer, Aneas receives the supernatural com- 
mand : 

** The gods of her domestic shrines 
That country to your care consigns ; 
Receive them now, to share your fate ; 
Provide them warriors strong and great. 
The city's walls, which heaven has willed, 
Beyond the seas you yet shall build." 

Shakespeare introduces his Prince amidst like 
surroundings. His royal father had been 

" Of life, of crown and queen at once dispatched," 

the state * dismantled,' and the Ghost of the elder 
Hamlet, in reply to his distracted son, who, asking 
concerning his appearance and what he himself 
should do, gave him a revelation and command 
which was as sacred to Hamlet as the command of 
Hector to Aneas. 

Virgil's prince left his home and wandered long, 
devoted himself entirely to the execution of the 
command of Hector's ghost. And Hamlet 
promises : 

*♦ Yea, from the table of my memory 
ril wipe away all trivial fond records. 
All saws of books, all forms, all pressure past. 
That youth and observation copied there ; 
And thy commandment all alone shall live 
Within the book and volume of my brain, 
Unmixed with baser matter." 

Aneas and Hamlet both court death as a refuge 
from sorrow. Aneas cries : 



156 The Secret of Hamlet, 

" O, happy, thrice and yet again, 
Who died at Troy like valiant men, 

E'en in their parents' view! 
O Diomed, first of Greeks in fray. 
Why press'd I not the plain that day. 

Yielding my life to you, 
Where stretched beneath a Phrygian sky, 
Fierce Hector, tall Sarpedon lie : 
Where Simois tumbles 'neath his wave ^ 

Shields, helms, and bodies of the brave?" 

Hamlet prays : 

** O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt. 
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! 
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! " 

Aneas, in the court of Dido, the Carthagenian 
queen, is represented as wraped in clouds by the 
power of the goddess. His presence, purposes, 
and intentions are known only to himself and his 
friend Achates. They see the Queen and courtiers 
and their comrades, but are unseen by them. 
Virgil says : 

** But Venus either traveler shrouds 
With thickest panoply of clouds. 
That none may see them, touch nor stay. 
Nor, idly asking, breed delay." 

Shakespeare veils Hamlet in clouds as he wan- 
ders from the presence of his father's Ghost to the 
court of Claudius. The veil conceals him from the 
King and Queen and from all except his friend 
Horatio. And Claudius, expressing his fears as to 
Laertes, says : 

•' Her brother is in secret come from France; 
Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds V 



The Secret of Hainlet. 157 

Marcellus says : 

" Thou art a scholar: speak to it, Horatio," 

implying an acquaintance with the Latin language, 
the only appropriate language in which to address 
a ghost, according to the popular superstition. 
The ghost of Sichaeus appears to Dido : 

'* And shows, to aid her on her way. 
His buried treasures, stores untold 
Of silver and of massy gold." 

And Horatio says, in his address to the Ghost of 
the elder Hamlet : 

•* Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life 
Extorted treasure in the womb of Earth, 
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, 
Speak of it; stay, and speak." 

Aneas is prompted by his father's ghost : 

** Now sable night invests the sky. 
When lo ! descended from on high 
The semblance of Anchises seemed 
To give him counsel as he dreamed." 

And the Ghost of Hamlet's father says : 

" This visitation 
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose." 

Horatio speaks of ' stars with trains of fire ' in 
the list of omens ' precurse of fierce events,' and 
Virgil tells of Acestes shooting in the air 

•* to show 
His veteran skill and sounding bow. 
***** 
E'en in the mid expanse of skies 
The arrow kindles as it flies, 



158 The Secret of Hamlet. 

Behind it draws a fierj glare, 
Then wasting, vanishing in the air: 
So stars, dislodged, athwart the night 
Careen, and trail a length of light." 

Horatio refers to himself : 

** No. I am more an antique Roman than a Dane," 

and shows his acquaintance with Roman tradition 
in his reference to omens, ' a little ere the mightiest 
Julius fell.' 

The pious Aneas, like Hamlet, never tires in 
praising his father. Each seeks an interview with 
his father's ghost, and receives almost identical 
revelations from the dead. Anchises tells the 
* secrets of his prison-house ' to his son Aneas : 

" Nay, when at last the life has fled, 
And left the bodj cold and dead, 
E'en then, there passes not away 
The painful heritage of clay; 
Full many a long contracted stain 
Perforce must linger deep in grain, 
So penal sufferings they endure 
For ancient crime to make them pure ; 
Some hang aloft in open view 
For winds to pierce them through and through 
While others purge their guilt deep-dyed 
In burning fire or whelming tide." 

The elder Hamlet says to his son : 

•* I am thy father's spirit; 
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, 
And for the day confined to fast in fires, 
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
Are burnt and purged away." 



The Secret of Hamlet. 159 

He is not at liberty, as Anchises, to tell the 
* secrets ' of his ' prison-house : ' 

'' But that I am forbid 
To tell the secrets of my prison-house, 
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word 
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, 
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, 
Thy knotted and combined locks to part. 
And each particular hair to stand on end. 
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine." 

Aneas courted, loved, and would have wedded 
Dido but for the command of the ghost of Hector. 
Dido, the Queen, suicides, evidencing her insanity, 
and Aneas, when attended by the sybil in the 
lower regions, meets the spirit of Dido, and thus 
explains the cause of his reluctant flight : 

By Heaven, by all that dead men keep 
In reverence here 'mid darkness deep, 
Against my Tvill, ill-fated fair, 

I parted from your land. 
The gods at whose command to-'day 
Through these dim shades I take my way, 
Tread the waste realms of sunless blight 
And penetrate abysmal night, 
They drove me forth." 

Hamlet courted, loved, and would have wedded 
with Ophelia but for the command of his father's 
Ghost. Ophelia's life ended by her own act in 
insanity, resulting from Hamlet's conduct toward 
her. He would have followed her into the shades 
below and ' buried quick ' within her grave, would 
have attested his devotion and proved to Ophelia's 
spirit that his love was true, and that he forsook 



i6o The Secret of Hamlet. 

her, not because he did not love, but because the 
execution of the command of his father's Ghost 
demanded it. 

The play that ' pleased not the million,' treated 
of Virgil's hero, for Hamlet says : 

*' One speech in it I chiefly loved, 'twas 

Aneas' tale to Dido — the great story within a story." 

Then, in fulfillment of Shakespeare's plan to write 
a play within a play of ' Hamlet,' follows the 
Prince's resolution to have a play before the King. 
The last seen of Aneas, Turnus is prostrate on 
the ground before him : 

♦' Rolling his eyes, Aneas stood. 

And check'd his sword, athirst for blood, 

Now faltering more and more he felt 

The human heart within him melt, 

When round the shoulder wreathed in pride 

The belt of Pallas he espied. 

And sudden flash'd upon his view 

Those golden studs so well he knew. 

Which Turnus from the stripling tore 

When breathless on the field he lay. 

And on his breast in triumph wore, 

Memorial of the bloody day. 

Soon as his eyes had gazed their fill 

On that sad instrument of ill. 

Live fury kindling every vein, 

He cries with terrible disdain : 

' What ! in my friend's dear spoil arrayed 

To me for mercy sue ? 

* 'Tis Pallas, Pallas guides the blade : 
From your curs'd blood his injured shade 

Thus takes the atonement due.' 
Thus as he spoke, his sword he drave 



The Secret of Hamlet. i6i 

With fierce and fiery blow 
Through the broad breast before him spread : 
The stalwart limbs grow cold and dead : 
One groan the indignant spirit gave, 
Then sought the shades below." 

Laertes makes his confession and Hamlet shouts : 

" The point 
Envenomed too ! There, venom, to thj work !" 

He stabs the King and dies. 

Shakespeare evidently had in mind Orestes, the 
typical Greek, ' driven to deeds of vengeance by 
the powers above ; ' and also Aneas, the typical 
Roman, ' compelled by his ghost — commanded 
filial conscience to yield his own desires and serve 
the state.' These originals are the Boaz and 
Jachin pillar-types, of men on which man — the 
ideal, composite man — the temple of humanity- 
Hamlet — rests. 

DRAMA OF LIFE. 

In the Drama of Life, Man hears the command of 
his Father's Spirit imposing upon him the law of 
human duty ; and his life is a struggling, hindered 
life, a conflict betwixt the higher and lower natures. 
He is a Prince, and may be King, the lower self — 
the inner Claudius deposed — the natural man cruci- 
fied and dead, the true self may arise to ' newness of 
life,' assert moral order, and ascend the throne of 
Inner Dominion. But the way to the Kingdom is 
narrow ; obstacles — the world (of rotten Denmark) 
— the flesh (too, too solid flesh) and the devil must 
II 



1 62 The Secret of Hamlet. 

be overcome ; a great struggle is involved. Besides, 
the struggle is to be lawful ; w^e are not to blame 
heredity, but assert moral order in a world of evil : 

*' But, howsoever thou pursuest this act 
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
Against thy mother aught." 

ELSINORE. 

In ' Hamlet,' the visible stage slopes off into the 
misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead 
and hades beneath ; the visible world painted in to 
complete the picture. This is a miniature of the 
stage-setting of Nature, in the great Drama of 
Humanity, and also, an outer representation of the 
inner condition of Hamlet's heart — the inner Elsi- 
nore of universal experience. And El-sin-or-e! is 
this world a battle ground in which God, Sin, and 
Evil strive for dominion? And is there an inner 
Elsinore — the human heart — where Good and Evil 
forces contend for the throne of inner dominion ? 



GHOST OF THE ELDER HAMLET. 

The Supernatural is represented by the Ghost in 
Hamlet. The Spirit of the Elder Hamlet seeks his 
son. He has no communication for Marcellus nor 
Horatio. Esoterically, Shakespeare suggests his 
philosophy and psychology, and therefore, he does 
not allow the Ghost to speak to Marcellus, who in 
the Tragedy is simply an officer under authority, 
and represents the ' senses ' — one who lives on the 



The Secret of Hafftlet. 163 

plane of the senses. Horatio dwells on the higher 
plane of reason. He is the close friend of Hamlet, 
and Marcellus reports to Horatio, and not directly 
to the Prince. The human reason is the medium 
betwixt sense and soul. If Man sees an apparition, 
the sense (of sight) reports to the reason, and Man 
thinks about the sight. The Ghost makes no reply 
to Horatio — reason ; it has a message only for Ham- 
let. It is the Conscience in Man that knows the 
Supernatural, and hears the immediate voice of the 
Spirit. 

Shakespeare takes three men dwelling upon three 
distinct planes — Marcellus, Horatio, and Hamlet — to 
outwardly represent Man. Hamlet includes esoter- 
ically — within himself — all that Marcellus, Horatio, 
and Hamlet esoterically represent — 'sense,' 'intel- 
lect,' and 'conscience.' Shakespeare presents a 
psychological problem in the closing dramatic action 
of the first Act. To illustrate : 

When Marcellus and Horatio take hold of Hamlet 
to hinder him from following the Ghost, Hamlet 
releases himself and communes with the apparition. 
The struggling Prince goes beyond the ' senses ' 
and 'reason;' communes with the Supernatural; 
and presently is again with Marcellus and Horatio, 
upon the plane of sense and reason. These friends 
vainly implore him to tell them his high experience. 
He is still the hindered Man ; refuses ; and the Act 
closes with Hamlet's words : " Nay, come ; lefs go 
together." 

Marcellus, Horatio, and Hamlet leave the plat- 
form and go into the Castle together. Hamlet has 



164 The Secret of Hamlet. 

his senses and reason now, at the close of the first 
Act : Will he keep them all the way through the 
play? 

ORGANISM AND ENVIRONMENT. 

Man is hindered by his organism and environ- 
ment. He can not apprehend the Supernatural by 
the senses — the Marcellus element of his nature. 
Neither by the reason — his Horatio element ; be- 
cause the reason only apprehends relations, and 
the senses only apprehend objects ; but man has a 
capacity for the reception of the Supernatural. He 
is the Supernatural in embryo — an ' image of God.' 
Man is a son of God; the Father's Spirit can 
reveal Himself and His Law to the Son of His 
Image. 

It is the Hamlet in Man that can commune with 
the Supernatural. The usurping Claudius must be 
dethroned, in the orderly way of Justice and 
Righteousness. 

HAMLET. 

This name is anagrammatized from 'Amleth,' a 
mythical character, by placing the h first. Amleth 
is from the Icelandic — from Amla^ to toil^ and 
Lothi^ devoted to; a mythic impersonation of the 
endless toil and travail of the sea. 

Shakespeare — ' one who shakes a speare ' — trans- 
figured and elevated this suggestion into the con- 
ception of Hamlet. He makes Life itself the sea, 
and Marl's voyage in his body -ship, the toiling 



Tlie Secret of Ha7nlet. 165 

traveler to that ' undiscovered country from whose 
bourn no traveler returns.' 

Placing the definition of ' H,' 'Am,' and ' Let,' 
together in their order, the esoteric meaning of 
Hamlet is revealed, as Humanity Hindered; the 
Man-hindered ; and this accounts for his hesitation, 
inactivity, and procrastination. It is the hesitation 
of character, not disease ; nature, not caprice. His 
voyage must be in accordance with his compass and 
chart, his conscience and sense of Righteousness. 

Hamlet means, in another sense, a village with- 
out a church ; a village without a governing mu- 
nicipality. Esoterically, a collection of faculties 
not reduced to order ; a little world ; a chaos which 
may become a cosmos. Hamlet is a ' kingdom 
within,' an inner kingdom at war with itself; dif- 
ferent passions and persons desiring to rule. He 
is only 

PRINCE OF DENMARK, 

not King ; he ought to rule, but he does not. The 
inner throne has no permanent ruler ; sometimes 
reason rules, then passion ; now conscience ; then 
circumstances ; now the potential spiritual man ; 
now the developed natural man. Man is ' out of 
joint,' his faculties disarranged, his ' inner king- 
dom ' ' dismantled.' He is out of harmony with 
himself ; his will and passions contend against his 
conscience and reason. There is something wrong 
— ' something rotten in the state of Denmark ' — 
something has disarranged the faculties. An inner 
usurping Claudius is in the way. Hamlet realizes 



1 66 The Secret of Haynlet, 

the condition of internal anarchy and disorder in 
the State of his ' Denmark ' body-prison of ' too, 
too solid flesh.' 

" The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right." 

But this is 

MAN^S MISSION IN LIFE, 

to set himself right ; to realize an inner atonement 
— and if he would consent to follow the still small 
voice within — the Father's Spirit — the Holy Ghost 
— he would be led into harmony with himself and 
his environment. 

But Man hesitates t*nd his power of action decays. 
And when after struggling, and the purpose of 
action is resolved upon, he realizes the truth that — 

'* Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion all the interim is 
Like a phantasm, or a hideous dream; 
The genius and the mortal instruments 
Are there in council ; and the state of man. 
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection." 
For 

** Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape 
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger or of ape? 
Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning age of ages 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?" 

Hamlet is warned not to defile himself in execut- 
ing his father's business. He is to remember that 

" Him, only him the shield of Jove defends 
Whose means are pure and spotless as his ends." 



The Secret of Hamlet. 167 

The people of Denmark have rights that he must 
respect. He must not contrive aught against his 
mother ; neither shock the moral sense of the nation. 
He must not do violence to the voices of his own 
inner kingdom; he must fulfill righteousness; he 
must not destroy the Law. 

CLAUDIUS, 

must be dealt with according to law. His guilt 
must be established by proof that all Denmark will 
accept, and the condemnation and death of the 
usurping King must meet the approval of the Danes. 
The Prince knows that Claudius is a murderer, 
usurper ; but he can not prove the murderer guilty 
in the eyes of the Danish nation— composed as it is 
of men who only live on the plane of ' sense ' and 
* reason.' He can not summon the Ghost, the Su- 
pernatural can not speak with the Marcellus' and 
Horatio's of the outer or inner Kingdoms of Man. 
He must wait. Claudius must live until his charac- 
ter and past crimes shall reveal themselves to all. 
Man's appetites and passions are not put into his 
nature merely to be killed. Man is to utter himself 
— his higher self. A part of his nature is made to 
think deeply, feel nobly, made to be charitable and 
chivalric, made to worship, to pity, and to love. 
The positive expression and work of the higher self 
is the one worthy purpose of life. This is dethron- 
ing the inner Claudius according to the inner law, 
' whose seat is the bosom of God,' whose ' voice the 
harmonyof the world.' Law: ' all things in heaven 



l68 The Secret of Hamlet, 

and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling 
her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her 
power.' The seat of Law is also in the bosom of 
Man and her voice the harmony of the Microcosm 
— the inner subjective kingdom of Man. 

Coleridge remarks of Hamlet's cowardice that it 
proceeded merely from that aversion to action which 
prevails among such as have a world in thejnselves. 
And Owen says : 

" He falls a prey first to his own genius for pro- 
found many-sided meditation, his subtilizing and 
refining instincts, his invincible preference for the 
ideal and abstract as compared with the actual and 
concrete ; and, secondly, to the varied consider- 
ations, the manifold difficulties and perplexities 
which he so readily detects in every object of 
thought and of action. Hamlet's universe — his own 
subjective microcosm was therefore just as full of 
uncertainties, antagonisms, unsolved and insoluble 
problems as the universe of Prometheus, of Job, and 
of Faust. To him every human motive and im- 
pulse, the scope and result of every separate act, all 
the accompaniments and relations of human conduct 
seem to present the appearance, not of simplicity, 
but of complexity. 

** So study evermore is overshot; 
While it doth study to have what it would, 
It doth forget to do the thing it would." 



The Secret of Hamlet, 169 

MONTAIGNE 

was a great incentive to the expression of Shake- 
speare's skeptical disquisitions contained in Hamlet, 
and scattered throughout his other dramas. Biron 
in ' Love's Labours Lost,' especially reminds one 
of the skepticism and cynicism of the great essayist. 
*' I heard with pleasure," says Emerson, " that one 
of the newly discovered autographs of William 
Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of 
Montaigne. It is the only book which we certainly 
know to have been in the Poet's library." 

Skepticism has been defined as the antithesis in 
every possible manner of phenomena and noumena ; 
and Shakespeare's favorite conception of Humanity 
might be defined as a centre-point of contradic- 
tions — a seething mass of conflicting opinions, 
instincts, feelings, and attributes. "Thus there is 
a perpetual conflict between the will and the 
reason, between reason and imagination, between 
the will and the act, or between theory and prac- 
tice, between rude will and grace, between tempta- 
tion and conscience, between desire and fruition." 

Shakespeare discerns room for doubt in the laws 
and principles of human action. So Friar Lau- 
rence tells us : 

** For naught so vile that on the earth doth live, 
But to the earth some special good doth give ; 
Nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use, 
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: 
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied ; 
And vice sometimes by action dignified," 



170 The Secret of Hamlet, 

In this world, vice and virtue can not be defi- 
nitely separated : 

'* In the corrupted currents of this world, 
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice; 
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself 
Buys out the law." 

In the Heavenly world it is different : 

** But 'tis not so above. 
There is no shuffling — there the action lies 
In his true nature." 

Hamlet is the skeptic of practice, one whose 
power of action is paralyzed by over-much reflec- 
tion. His character is partially shown in other 
creations of the Poet. He is the excessive develop- 
ment of a faculty found in most men who are 
thinkers. " The union of keen thought with slow 
cautions or imperfect volition — a psychological ana- 
logue to the weakening of some physical power 
which comes from the redundant vigor of vitality 
of another." 

"A sharp wit matched with too blunt a will." 

This is entirely Hamletic : 

♦*A tardiness in nature 
Which often leaves the history unspoke 
That intends to do." 

King Claudius says : 

"And like a man to double business bound, 
I stand in pause where I shall first begin. 
And both neglect." 

But, just as great minds are especially given to 
speculation, so also is it true that acts invite and 
justify speculation in proportion to their greatness : 



The Secret of Hainlet. 171 

" Checks and disasters 
Grow in the veins of actions highest reared, 
As knots by the conflux of meeting sap 
Infect the sound pine and divert his grain, 
Tortive and errant from his course of growth." 

Brutus most resembles Hamlet, and in his apology 
for his seeming suspicion of mankind, and neglect 
of his friends, says : 

*' Nor construe any further my neglect 
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war, 
Forgets the shows of love to other men." 

Men like Hamlet prefer deliberation to decision, 
contrivance and policy to action, and indefinite 
search to discovery. The endless strivings of Faust 
is the intellectual analogue to the indefinite hesita- 
tion in action of Hamlet, both being alike deter- 
mined by excess of imaginative power. Intellectual 
doubt often has no other significance than procras- 
tinated conviction, or postponement of action. 
Prometheus looked forward to a deliverer from the 
tyranny of Zeus, and Job was confident of a vindi- 
cator of his righteousness from the false accusations 
of his friends. Cautious thinkers postpone the final 
statement of their creed, hoping for more light. 

Hamlet is not only great in thought, but great in 
feeling. He possesses great emotional susceptibil- 
ity, and realizes the power of passion : 

" Passion is but the slave to memory, 
Of violent birth but poor validity. 
What to ourselves in passion we propose, 
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. 
The violence of either grief or joy 
Their own enactures with themselves destroy." 



1^2 The Secret of Hamlet. 

He is represented by his enemy as being remiss : 

'• Most generous and free from all contriving." 

And in complete harmony with this view, Shake- 
speare represents him not as successfully contriving 
his uncle's death, but as himself falling an acci- 
dental victim to his uncle's plot. 

POLONIUS, 

the superficial, talkative, conceited dogmatist, is 
the real antagonist of Hamlet. Hamlet points to 
his head as a ' distracted globe.' Polonius declares 
that, given the circumstances, he could find 

*' Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed, 
Within the centre." 

Johnson says Polonius is ' knowing in retrospect, 
and ignorant in foresight.' He has great knowl- 
edge of the world, a diplomatic experience, and a 
success in ' hunting the trail of policy.' He is a 
politician whose faculties are declining, and whose 
strongest point is his memory. " Such a man," 
says Johnson, *' is positive and confident, because 
he knows that his mind was once strong, but knows 
not that it has become weak." He is now only an 
echo of his former self. 

LAERTES, 

is quite a contrast to Hamlet. He is not noble, 
yet there are elements of nobleness in him: his 
respect for his father, love for his sister, and obedi- 
ence to the King, speak well for him as a son, 



The Secret of Hafnlet, 173 

brother, and subject of Denmark. He is a man of 
the world, and has few moral scruples ; delights in 
the gaities of the French capital — lives and dies 
quite different from the Prince of Denmark. 
" Laertes dies repenting of the base wrong he has 
done to Hamlet, and begging his forgiveness ; 
Hamlet dies pitying Laertes, and forgiving him." 



GERTRUDE, 

signifies a ' spear-maiden,' and doubtlessly took its 
present form from the name Geruth in the old 
Danish history. Her character explains why 
Shakespeare should eliminate the expressive ' h ' 
from the name Geruth, and change it to Gertrude. 
In the play she is represented as carried along in 
the train of consequences which her own guilt had 
started. 

SIN 

is the central theme of Hamlet : its growing conse- 
quences, sure return upon the heads of those who 
walk in evil ways, and the judgment reached when 
the ' wheel comes full circle.' It is a dramatic 
representation 

*• Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; 
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughter; 
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; 
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook 
Fall'n on the inventors' heads." 

Gertrude reveals the hearts of the evil doers : 



1 74 The Secret of Hamlet. 

" To my sick soul, as sin^s true nature is, 
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss : 
So full of artless jealousy is guilt, 
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt." 

The play of Hamlet is evidently a Psychological 
Drama of the inner soul-life of humanity. The 
inner stage — the inner Elsinore — is Hamlet's heart. 
Francisco represents the inner feeling of fear, as 
yet undefined, vague yet real fear, and he is the 
chorus of Hamlet's heart, the herald of his inner 
feelings and perplexities, before the Prince is 

introduced. 

♦* 'Tis bitter cold, 
And I am sick at heart," 

is an audible confession of Hamlet's heart through 
his chorus, Francisco. 

Marcellus and Bernardo represent the senses — 
mere officers — reporters to the king of the inner 
kingdom. 

HORATIO 
represents the ' reason,' an intimate friend of Ham- 
let who, as explained in the sequel, represents the 
* divinity within ' — conscience, or the capacity for 
the reception of the revelation from the supernatual. 
Shakespeare has revealed his psychological ability 
in discerning and expressing the true relation be- 
tween acts of the will and the results of subsequent 
reaction, in the moulding of character. His living 
physical symbols express accurately internal states 
of the soul. This is the secret of the popularity of 
the play. It ' speaks by card ' to universal human 
experience. 



The Secret of Hamlet. 175 



THE KEY TO HAMLET 

is in all probability intentionally given in the eso- 
teric meaning of the name, Hamlet, and shown in 
the definition of the word in its anagrammatiza- 
tion from ' Amleth.' It is easier to think this, 
than to believe that the names, Hamlet, Horatio, 
and Ophelia only accidentally reveal their respec- 
tive characters and history in the secret meaning of 
their respective names. Especially as the ethical 
significance and spiritual sense of the drama per- 
fectly accords with this view, as interpreted by a 
* consensus of the Competent.' For the present, 
^ the rest is silence.' 



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